Assessment of Quality of Life of Chronic Kidney Disease Patients Receiving Hemodialysis with Kidney Disease Quality of Life™-36 Scale

Chronic kidney disease and the methods of its treatment play an important part in shaping the Quality of Life QOL of patients receiving dialysis. KDQOL™-36 is the most widely used instrument to evaluate health related quality of life of chronic kidney disease patients. The aim of the study was the subjective assessment of the quality of life (QOL) of patients treated with hemodialysis and also to understand the distribution of component scores of the scale with distribution of responses to individual items of the scale among the selected sample. This cross sectional study was conducted among randomly selected 151 patients of chronic kidney disease receiving hemodialysis with pre-dialysis proper education at Inpatient Department in National Institute of Kidney Diseases and Urology (NIKDU), Dhaka, Bangladesh during the period of June 2018 to December 2018. The instrument to measure the QOL was Kidney Disease and Quality of Life Bangla version 36 (KDQOL™-36). Recruited patients were interviewed with questionnaire technique to collect data with the scale which is a structured questionnaire comprised of four subscales. Mean scores ±SD of the domain of the physical and mental component summary, burden of kidney disease, symptoms and problems of kidney disease and effects of kidney disease subscales were 29.3±16.03, 16.93±13.0, 81.09±13.14 and 61.67±13.84 respectively. The mean ±SD of the combined score for all the four domains was 47.24±11.52. The rate of those with impaired QOL (mean score <66.7) was 96.7%. The most bothersome domain was burden of the kidney disease domain, where the mean scores of all the items were below 66.7. The study provides information that regular pre-dialysis attendance helps to provide the patient with proper education and thereby achieve better QOL among patients of chronic kidney disease receiving hemodialysis. By using the KDQOL™-36 scale this study finds that the domain of symptom of the kidney disease appeared to have least effect on the quality of life as the mean scores ranged higher from other subscales and in most cases the scores were above 66.7.