Health-related quality of life among children/adolescents living with HIV/AIDS in Lagos State, Nigeria

Abstract

Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQL) is commonly used to assess the impact of health status on quality of life. The HRQL data obtained does not follow the assumption of normality and a non-parametric test was used to make inference in this study. This study compares the characteristics of children with HRQL classified as good, intermediate, and poor quality of life. The children and adolescents that have a good health-related quality of life had a mean rank of 75.5, intermediate, 27.0 while children and adolescents with poor HRQL had a mean rank of 8.5. The health -related quality of life differs significantly across the demographic characteristics. However, tertiary education does not differ significantly on HRQL. The Kruskal-Wallis’s chi-squared was 76.95 with two degrees of freedom and p-value < 2.2e-16. The p-value < 0.05 indicates sufficient evidence that HRQL of children and adolescents differs significantly across the three categories. Conclusively, children and adolescents in the three categories have different quality of life. It is clear that most of the children and adolescents had a good health-related quality of life once they have been taking their drugs regularly as prescribed by the physician. Keywords: Quality of life; Kruskal-Wallis analysis; children.