Quality of Life among Patients Suffering from Chronic Kidney Disease in Chronic Kidney Disease Clinic of Thailand

Abstract

Background: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) has directly affected the quality of life (QOL) of patients. Objective: The objective of this study was to explore the QOL and its associated factors among CKD patients in Thailand. Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted with 258 CKD patients from the CKD clinics between January to December 2017. A validated and reliable tool, KDQOL-SF™ 1.3, consisting of 19 domains categorized into three components: physical component summary (PCS), mental component summary (MCS), and kidney disease component summary (KDCS), was adopted to assess QOL through trained data collectors. Ordinal Logistic regression was used to detect the associations between variables at the significance level of 0.05. Results: Among two hundred and fifty-eight patients, 53.9% were females, 67.4% were more than 60 years old, and 73.6% were employed. Employed CKD patients had a better PCS compared to unemployed ones (odds ratio (OR)= 2.87, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.52-5.42) and patients who had education lower than primary school (OR = 2.41; 95% CI = 1.02-5.69) tended to have a better PCS compared to those who had secondary and higher school education. CKD patients who had no income tended to have a poorer PCS (OR = 0.40; 95% CI = 0.18-0.91) and MCS (OR = 0.39; 95% CI = 0.18-0.83) than those patients who had an income of more than 10,000 baht. 3a CKD stage patients (OR = 2.62; 95% CI = 1.19-5.77) were more likely to have a good MCS compared to 5 CKD stage patients. ESRD patients who had primary school level education (OR = 0.25; 95% CI = 0.07-0.89) tended to have a poorer KDCS than those patients who had secondary and higher school level education. Conclusion: The study concludes that QOL among CKD patients in CKD clinics needs to improve. Public health should reform and implement the appropriate policy of CKD clinic and intervention to improve QOL among CKD patients by focusing on CKD patients’ occupation, income, education, and the stage of CKD.