Functional abilities and health-related quality of life in patients with spinal cord injury in a rehabilitation center.

Thesis Report.

ABSTRACT:

Background: Spinal cord injury (SCIs) is a serious condition that causes several health problems that negatively affect not only the patient’s physical condition but all aspects of their lives including their goals and communications, and more importantly their health-related quality of life.

Objectives: The objectives of the study were to assess functional abilities and health- related quality of life and to measure the correlation between them among patients with spinal cord injury in a rehabilitation center.

Methods: A descriptive cross sectional research design was used to conduct the study among 85 samples using complete enumeration sampling method. Data were collected using SCIM III tool for assessing functional abilities and SF-36 tool for assessing health-related quality of life. Data were analyzed with descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation. For inferential statistics chi square test was used at P=0.05 level of significance.

Results: Mean age of the respondents was 36.34 ± 11.79 years with majority of patients being paraplegic (92.9%). The total functional abilities was significantly associated with disability related variables like age during injury (p = 0.04), duration of injury (p= 0.02) and level of injury (p= 0.007). The mean score of health-related quality of life was highest (56.62 ±30.42) in social functioning and lowest in physical functioning domain. There is a statistically significant association of health-related quality of life with duration of injury (p=0.00). The study illustrates that there was a moderate positive correlation between functional abilities and health-related quality of life (r=0.34).

Conclusion: The socio-demographic context of the patients with spinal cord injury revealed that the majority of respondents were male and major proportion of individual suffered from paraplegia following injury and most of the respondent suffered injury after 20 years of age. As to their quality of life, about half of the individuals with SCI had lower quality of life, the most compromised domain was physical functioning and the most preserved was the social functioning domain.

Keywords: Functional abilities, Health-related quality of life, Spinal cord injury