Quality of Life in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes: Application of WHOQoL-BREF Scale

Background: diabetes is one of the most important chronic diseases which may have a negative effect on the quality of life (qol) of diabetic patients. the objective of this study was to evaluate qol in patients with type 2 diabetes living in rural regions of neyshabur (a city in the northeast of iran) as well as determine some factors associ-ated with it, by using the whoqol-brefe scale.methods and materials: in this cross-sectional study, a total of 1847 patients with type 2 diabetes were studied in neyshabur from april to july 2012. the iranian ver-sion of the whoqol-bref questionnaire was used to measure qol. linear regres-sion model was conducted to determine the relation between qol of study population and various variables. the level of significance was set at p < 0.05 for all analyses. data were analyzed using spss software ver16.results: the mean age of the study population was 59.65 ± 12.3 yr (range: 30-97 yr). the majority of participants were female (69.8%). the overall observed cronbach’s alpha coefficient for whoqol-bref was 0.93 and for each domain of it ranged from 0.69 to 0.86. the total mean score of whoqol-bref was 12.18. the lowest and the highest mean scores were observed in psychological health domain (11.73) and social relationship domain (12.66), respectively. backward multiple linear re-gression model revealed that education levels, marital status and household income were significantly associated with all domains of whoqol-bref (p < 0.05).conclusions: the findings from this study appear that surveyed diabetic patients have whoqol-bref scores that might be considered to indicate a moderate to low qol, so it seems that providing international programs is necessary to improve qol of them