Paper
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Gender Differences in Health-Related Quality of Life of Heart Failure Patients
Bunny J. Pozehl, PhD, APRN, Kathleen Duncan, PhD, RN, and Melody Hertzog, PhD. College of Nursing, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Lincoln, NE, USA
| Learning Objective #1: describe gender differences in health related quality of life for heart failure patients. |
| Learning Objective #2: describe health-related quality of life for heart failure patients as measured by the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire. |
Heart failure (HF) is a chronic disease with an enormous impact on patient’s health-related quality of life. The purpose of this study was to explore gender differences in health-related quality of life for patients with heart failure. Baseline data was analyzed from a randomized clinical trial with 42 HF patients. Twenty-four subjects were male and 18 were female. Fifty percent of the subjects had ischemic HF and 50% were non-ischemic. Mean age was 61.24 ± 14.35 years and mean left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) was 32.86 ± 6.16%. There were no significant differences by gender in age, LVEF or functional status as measured by the 6-minute walk test. The Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) was utilized to measure health-related quality of life. The KCCQ has eight domains each ranging from 0 to 100 with lower scores indicating greater impairment. Independent t-test results showed women had significantly greater impairment [t (df=38) = 2.20, p = .034] in the total symptom score (65.3 ± 23.6) as compared to men (79.2 ± 16.1). Women also had significantly greater impairment [t (df=38) = 2.28, p = .029] in the KCCQ symptom frequency domain (63.0 ± 22.9) as compared to men (77.7 ± 17.8). The only two domain scores of the KCCQ that showed women to have less impairment than men were the quality of life domain [t (df=38) = -.22, p = .826] and the self-efficacy domain [t (df=38) = -1.68, p = .102] and these differences were non-significant. Findings from this study suggest that interventions to improve quality of life in heart failure may need to be gender specific. Further study is needed to explore differences in health-related quality of life and the symptom experience for men and women with HF.