The Impact of Clinical Factors on Health-related Quality of Life in Adult Patients with Asthma
Raed Abdullah Alharbi *
Department of Public Health, College of Applied Medical Sciences, Majmaah University, Majmaah-11952, Saudi Arabia.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Background: Several clinical factors, such as: depression, obesity, and diabetes, have been linked to asthma in different ways, affecting health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with asthma.
Aim: Asthma is a long-term lung illness that causes a variety of respiratory difficulties that significantly affect an adult patient's quality of life in terms of physical and mental health as well as activity limitation. Additionally, a variety of related factors can exacerbate asthma. Clinical factors, such as: depression, obesity, and diabetes, are among the most significant categories of these factors. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine how these clinical characteristics affect health-related quality of life.
Methodology: The Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System in the United States provided open-source data for this investigation. It is a telephone-based health survey that gathers information from Americans. The Statistical Analysis System (9.4 version) was used for various descriptive, inferential, and predictive analysis techniques in order to achieve the study's goal.
Results: 42,875 of the 461,436 patients in the BRFSS 2014 data are current adult asthma patients. Of these asthmatic patients, 14,095 suffer from depression, and asthmatic patients 14,749 are obese. Among these asthmatic individuals, 7,392 have diabetes. Each clinical factor and measures of health-related quality of life were statistically significantly correlated, according to all p-values of various analyses.
Conclusions: The results of this study show that adult asthma patients with these clinical factors are more likely to have poor health-related quality of life than adult asthma patients without these clinical factors.
Keywords: Asthma, BRFSS, clinical factors, health informatics, HRQoL