Appraising the Impact of Hand and Knee Osteoarthritis on the Domains of Quality of Life among the Diabetic Patients - An Observational Research

Abstract

BACKGROUND Quality of life (QOL) measures have become a vital and frequently essential fragments to appraise health-care outcomes and is a powerful tool to determine the impact of healthcare as well as personal care for the population who are surviving with chronic diseases especially when ultimate cure for that specific disease is not conceived. METHODS This is a cross-sectional study where consecutive random sampling was utilised to select 258 diabetics from the general outpatient department (OPD) of a tertiary care center and QOL was evaluated among the diabetics and diabetics with osteoarthritis (OA) using modified Flanagan’s QOL scale. RESULTS The mean QOL among diabetics was 88.28 (± 2.62), mean QOL among diabetics with OA (hand) was 87.26 (± 2.22), mean QOL among diabetics with OA (knee) was 85.37 (± 2.14), mean QOL among diabetics with OA (knee and hand) was 83 (± 2.33), mean QOL among diabetics with OA with radiological changes was 80.77 (± 2.9). CONCLUSIONS The presence of more than one chronic disease significantly deteriorates the QOL. The domains of QOL are further affected when the chronic disease progresses further. KEY WORDS Quality of Life (QOL), Diabetes, Osteoarthritis, Chronic Diseases