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It has been found that people with disabilities remain at the margin as far as the different aspects of their lives are concerned. This paper tests the hypothesis that disability leads to lower quality of life among older adults in low and middle-income countries. The data from the Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) was used in this study which was conducted in Ghana, China, India, Russia, South Africa and Mexico. The disability scores have been made utilising Item Response Theory, Partial Credit Model and are centered on eight functioning and health areas. Bivariate analysis, binary logistic regression and pooled regression analysis have been used to fulfil the objectives of the paper. The findings reveal that disability acts as a hindrance in attaining a high quality of life (HQOL) amongst the older adults in the above mentioned low and middle-income countries. The older adults with disability are as much as 60% less likely to enjoy an HQOL with respect to the older adults without disability. Better socio-economic development like improved health care for disabled older adults with disability enhanced living standards for both abled and disabled, efficient pension schemes for older adults with disability and effective social service schemes would be very much essential to improve overall QOL among older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Headache disorders are disabling, with major consequences for productivity, yet the literature is silent on the relationship between headache-attributed disability and lost productivity, often erroneously regarding the two as synonymous. We evaluated the relationship empirically, having earlier found that investment in structured headache services would be cost saving, not merely cost-effective, if reductions in headache-attributed disability led to > 20% pro rata recovery of lost productivity. Methods: We used individual participant data from Global Campaign population-based studies conducted in China, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Russia, and from Eurolight in Lithuania, Luxembourg and Spain. We assessed relationships in migraine and probable medication-overuse headache (pMOH), the most disabling common headache disorders. Available symptom data included headache frequency, usual duration and usual intensity. We used frequency and duration to estimate proportion of time in ictal state (pTIS). Disability, in the sense used by the Global Burden of Disease study, was measured as the product of pTIS and disability weight for the ictal state. Impairment was measured as pTIS * intensity. Lost productivity was measured as lost days (absence or < 50% productivity) from paid work and corresponding losses from household work over the preceding 3 months. We used Spearman correlation and linear regression analyses. Results: For migraine, in a linear model, we found positive associations with lost paid worktime, significant (p < 0.05) in many countries and highly significant (p < 0.001) in some despite low values of R2 (0–0.16) due to high variance. With lost household worktime and total lost productivity (paid + household), associations were highly significant in almost all countries, although still with low R2 (0.04–0.22). Applying the regression equations for each country to the population mean migraine-attributed disability, we found pro rata recoveries of lost productivity in the range 16–56% (> 20% in all countries but Pakistan). Analysing impairment rather than disability increased variability. For pMOH, with smaller numbers, associations were generally weaker, occasionally negative and mostly not significant. Conclusion: Relief of disability through effective treatment of migraine is expected, in most countries, to recover > 20% pro rata of lost productivity, above the threshold for investment in structured headache services to be cost saving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]