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Quality of life and depressive symptoms in Chagas disease patients

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Abstract

Background

Besides the typical organic aspects of Chagas disease, the patients need to face physical, psychological, social and economic difficulties, which can compromise their quality of life. Consequently they may develop feelings of sadness, grief and loss, and depressive symptoms.

Methods

This study assessed the quality of life and depressive symptoms in 110 Chagas disease patients using WHOQOL-BREF for measuring the quality of life; also it was used Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) for depressive symptom evaluation.

Results

Among all patients, 51% were women; 42.5% considered their quality of life as positive and 40.9% presented depressive symptoms. Chagas disease clinical form distribution was: cardiac 49.09%, indeterminate 26.36%, digestive 12.73%, and mixed 11.82%. There was no significant difference comparing the depressive symptom intensity on gender, age and marital status, although there was a significant difference comparing depressive symptoms in indeterminate clinical form patients with others. All domains of WHOQOL-BREF showed significant correlation coefficients (Pearson).

Conclusions

At digestive form it was reported minor scores in the quality of life domains and greater ones on depressive symptom levels. There was a negative correlation between BDI and WHOQOL-BREF, suggesting that, among Chagas disease patients, the higher is the quality of life the lower is the intensity of depressive symptoms.

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Abbreviations

BDI:

Beck Depression Inventory

GEDoCh:

Group for Research on Chagas Disease

QOL:

Quality of life

UNICAMP:

State University of Campinas

WHO:

World Health Organization

WHOQOL-100:

World Health Organization Quality of Life Instrument

WHOQOL-BREF:

World Health Organization Quality of Life Instrument—abbreviated version

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to patients of the Group for Research on Chagas Disease (GEDoCh), at the Clinical Hospital of UNICAMP, Brazil, to Andrea Ferreira Semolini and Helymar Costa Machado, from the Statistics Service of the Research Commission, Faculty of Medical Sciences—UNICAMP for assistance in data analysis, to Telma Finardi for final English review and to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medical Sciences, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), PO Box 6111, Campinas, SP, 13083-970, Brazil

    Yaeko Ozaki, Maria Elena Guariento & Eros Antonio de Almeida

Authors
  1. Yaeko Ozaki
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  2. Maria Elena Guariento
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  3. Eros Antonio de Almeida
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Correspondence to Yaeko Ozaki.

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Ozaki, Y., Guariento, M.E. & de Almeida, E.A. Quality of life and depressive symptoms in Chagas disease patients. Qual Life Res 20, 133–138 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-010-9726-1

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