Impact of Clinical Characteristics on Quality of Life of Heart Failure Patients

Objective: This study aimed to determine impact of clinical characteristics on quality of life (QoL) in heart failure patients.

Methods: A cross-sectional study using a newly developed and validated research tool and Minnesota Living with Heart Failure (MLHF) research tool, was conducted in heart failure patients. Data was collected by convenience sampling method. Descriptive, comparative, and inferential statistics were used by Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) ver. 24 to determine the sociodemographic correlates of QoL in heart failure patients.

Results: The majority of the studied heart failure patients were male 103 (58.2%) and the females were 74 (41.8%). The most of the studied heart failure patients were from > 60 years of age group 73 (41.2%). In Spearman’s correlation analysis, statistically non-significant (p >0.05), weak and positive associations were observed. The studied clinical variables like disease duration, total no. of comorbidities, types of comorbidities i.e., HPT, dyslipidemia, renal problems, Diabetes mellitus (DM) and others, hospital admissions, no. of current medications were found to have positive correlation with patients overall QoL.

Conclusion: The study results concluded a weak but positive correlation between various studied clinical characteristics and QoL of the heart failure patients.