Research PaperSocial participation and health-related quality of life in people with multiple sclerosis
Section snippets
Participants
People who met the McDonald criteria (objective clinical findings, dissemination of specific lesions in the central nervous system and a paraclinical examination which helps to exclude false-positive and false-negative diagnoses of MS) were eligible for the study.19 A total of 153 consecutive people with MS from the Neurology Department of the L. Pasteur University Hospital in Košice were asked to participate in the study. There was no selection based on age, gender or other variables. All
Results
A basic description of the study population is given in Table 1 (n = 116). The respondents averaged 40.35 years old and consisted of 72.4% women. The mean EDSS score was 3.08, and the mean disease duration was 7.04 years. The majority of people (79.2%) were diagnosed with the relapse-remitting clinical type (Table 1).
Before we proceeded with the regressions, we prepared the data, starting with the correlations, which indicated that EDSS correlated strongly with the sociodemographic data. PCS
Discussion
The aim of this study was to determine if there is an association between social participation and the physical and mental components of health-related quality of life in people with MS. These associations were controlled for demographic and clinical variables. Our results provide evidence that social participation is an important factor associated with PCS, while in MCS it was not significant.
According to our results, higher PCS scores are associated with higher levels of peoples' satisfaction
Strengths and limitations
The main strength of this study is the approach regarding social participation on the basis of peer comparisons with the HRQoL. This, although without a control group, gives us a better understanding of social participation in one's specific conditions and not only a comparison with the general average population. Some limitations should be noted, however. Although the women-to-men ratio in MS is generally 2:1, in our sample this ratio was higher (72.4% women); thus, the results may be better
Conclusion
This study is beneficial in that it shows that social participation is very important for PCS in people with MS. According to our results, isolation and avoiding social activities are associated with lower HRQoL in people with MS. Hiding from social activities may seem comfortable and easy, as it eliminates the stress from obstacles to social participation caused by health problems, but this study indicates that there is an association between social participation and PCS. This could be the
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the people with multiple sclerosis who participated in this study.
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This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract APVV-0220-10 (80%). Furthermore, this work was partially supported by the Agency of the Slovak Ministry of the Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic for the Structural Funds of the EU under project no. ITMS: 26220120058 (20%).
Declaration of interest statement: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.