Background: With a high magnitude of hepatitis C in the country and theburden still rising it was imperative to assess the knowledge of HCV infected individuals, whichwould determine the further spread of the disease or otherwise based on the adoption of goodpractices by these patients. Objectives: To evaluate the knowledge and practice regardingHCV in Hepatitis C patients presenting at Ghurki Trust Teaching Hospital, Lahore and toformulate recommendations based on study results to improve knowledge about hepatitisC. Study Design: Descriptive cross-sectional study. Setting: Ghurki Trust Teaching Hospital(GTTH), Lahore. Period: January to May 2015. Methods: The patients of hepatitis C registeredat GTTH for treatment were included in the study after obtaining voluntary informed consentfrom the respondents and approval of the study from the institutional ethical review board. Theconvenience non-probability sampling technique was used to recruit 169 study participants.A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect information, which was recordedand analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences version 21.0. Data is describedin the form of frequencies and percentages for categorical variables and mean and standarddeviation for continuous variable. Results: Of the 169 HCV patients, 110(65%) had heard ofhepatitis C before acquiring it, the popular source of information regarding HCV was identifiedas relatives by 67(39.8%) of the patients. 70(41.4%) of the respondents were aware of a virusbeing the cause of hepatitis C, 140(82.8%) knew that HCV can be spread through sharinginjecting equipment, nearly half the respondents 87(51.5%) had asked their family membersto get tested for HCV and 68(40.2%) patients practiced safe sex. Conclusion: Majority of therespondents had heard of HCV before acquiring the disease. A large proportion of patients wereaware of the disease being spread through sharing injecting equipment. Half of the patients hadtheir family members tested for HCV. But less than half practiced safe sex.

ABSTRACT… Background: With a high magnitude of hepatitis C in the country and the burden still rising it was imperative to assess the knowledge of HCV infected individuals, which would determine the further spread of the disease or otherwise based on the adoption of good practices by these patients. Objectives: To evaluate the knowledge and practice regarding HCV in Hepatitis C patients presenting at Ghurki Trust Teaching Hospital, Lahore and to formulate recommendations based on study results to improve knowledge about hepatitis C. Study Design: Descriptive cross-sectional study. Setting: Ghurki Trust Teaching Hospital (GTTH), Lahore. Period: January to May 2015. Methods: The patients of hepatitis C registered at GTTH for treatment were included in the study after obtaining voluntary informed consent from the respondents and approval of the study from the institutional ethical review board. The convenience non-probability sampling technique was used to recruit 169 study participants. A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to collect information, which was recorded and analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences version 21.0. Data is described in the form of frequencies and percentages for categorical variables and mean and standard deviation for continuous variable. Results: Of the 169 HCV patients, 110(65%) had heard of hepatitis C before acquiring it, the popular source of information regarding HCV was identified as relatives by 67(39.8%) of the patients. 70(41.4%) of the respondents were aware of a virus being the cause of hepatitis C, 140(82.8%) knew that HCV can be spread through sharing injecting equipment, nearly half the respondents 87(51.5%) had asked their family members to get tested for HCV and 68(40.2%) patients practiced safe sex. Conclusion: Majority of the respondents had heard of HCV before acquiring the disease. A large proportion of patients were aware of the disease being spread through sharing injecting equipment. Half of the patients had their family members tested for HCV. But less than half practiced safe sex.

Purpose: To assess the impact of drug adherence and diabetes-related knowledge on the quality of life (QoL) of type 2 diabetes patients in a hospital in Pakistan.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in City Hospital, Multan, Pakistan between March and September 2020. A total of 151 patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) were recruited. Medication adherence, diabetes-related knowledge, and QoL were assessed by Drug attitude inventory-10 (DAI-10), the Michigan Diabetes Knowledge Test (MDKT), and EQ-5D-3L tools, respectively. The association between sociodemographic data and study variables was assessed by independent t-test and one-way ANOVA.Results: Among the 151 patients, 53 % were males. The mean MDKT score was 0.33 ± 0.18, indicating poor knowledge of diabetes. An overall moderate level of adherence was observed among the participants (mean adherence score, 6.14 ± 1.39). Mean QoL score was 1.31 ± 0.28, and the Visual Analog Scale score (VAS) was 59.6 ± 12.21, indicating a good to moderate QoL among the study participants. Study participants with a longer duration of diabetes and poor adherence to their medications showed poor QoL (p = 0.01, p = 0.004 respectively).Conclusion: Overall, the patients reported poor knowledge, moderate adherence, and good to moderate QoL. Moreover, patients with poor adherence to medication, longer duration of diabetes, and poorly controlled HbA1c showed poor QoL.