Comparison of Health-Related Quality of Life Between American and Taiwanese Heart Failure Patients

Abstract

Few investigators have compared health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in heart failure (HF) patients from different countries. The purposes of this study were to compare HRQOL between American (n=87) and Taiwanese (n=88) HF patients and to determine factors associated with HRQOL in both groups. In this cross-sectional survey, HRQOL was measured using the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire. American patients rated their HRQOL worse than did Taiwanese patients. Socio-demographics, disease severity, and symptom severity were associated with HRQOL, accounting for 42.4% of the variance in HRQOL in Americans and 57.3% in Taiwanese. Symptom severity was the most important predictor of HRQOL in both groups. Interventions targeting symptom severity could improve HF patients' HRQOL.

The effect of gender on health-related quality of life and related factors in post-lobectomy lung-cancer patients

“…These scores are better than other published studies on lung-cancer-surgery patients (Balduyck et al, 2008). A study that compared the HRQoL of patients in the United States and Taiwan with heart failure (Huang et al, 2010) and examined factors associated with their HRQoL found that those in the United States reported poorer HRQoL than those in Taiwan. Further, that study found correlations between sociodemographic factors, disease severity, and symptom severity with HRQoL, accounting for 42.4% and 57.3% of total HRQoL variance in U.S. and Taiwanese subjects.…”

Health-Related Quality of Life in Heart Failure in Jordan from Patients perspectives

“…Dyspnea and fluid retention are considered as main symptoms of HF [3,[27][28][29]. Even though participants expressed a general view of HF depended on their experiences but not from reading or health education.…”

Preditores da qualidade de vida relacionada à saúde de pacientes com insuficiência cardíaca

“…Dentre os sintomas físicos da IC, dispneia e fadiga são os mais frequentes e afetam adversamente vários aspectos da vida diária dos pacientes, como limitação da atividade física diária, do trabalho e atividades sociais, sendo um importante preditor de má QVRS (Heo et al, 2008a;Faller et al, 2009;Lesman-Leegte et al, 2009a ;Huang et al, 2010).…”

“…Esses resultados foram semelhantes aos encontrados em estudo com população tailandesa e estadunidense (Huang et al, 2010).…”

“…Neste estudo, pacientes com maior classe funcional NYHA tiveram pior QVRS (CFIII OR = 3,7; p = 0,002 -Tabela19), o que é consistente com a maioria dos resultados de outros estudos (Gott et al, 2006;Santos et al (2009);Pressler et al (2010b); Huang et al (2010), mas difere do encontrado por Sawafta et al(2013a).…”