Assessing the quality of life among patients with diabetes in Austria and the correlation between glycemic control and the quality of life.

Background: Quality of life is becoming an important health outcome and among the main goals of every healthcare intervention. This study aims to assess the reliability of the German version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF instrument (WHOQOL-BREF) among Austrian patients with diabetes and examine the correlation to glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c).
Methods: This was a cross-section study that involved 223 patients with diabetes who attended the diabetes center at Melk Hospital in Austria. The German version of the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire was used to assess their quality of life from 2018 to 2019. The response to each question was scored from 1 to 5 (ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree) on the Likert scale. The reliability of the WHOQOL-BREF instrument was assessed using the Cronbach's α, and the Spearman correlation coefficient was used to examine the correlation between the quality of life and the HbA1c.
Results: There were 208 valid WHOQOL-BREF questionnaires with a response rate of 93.7%. The overall observed Cronbach's α for WHOQOL-BREF was 0.86. The mean±standard deviation (SD) for the physical domain, psychological domain, social domain, and environmental domain were 61.9±19.1, 71.5±17.8, 71.0±19.6, and 81.3±11.1, respectively. There was a moderate but statistically significant negative correlation between HbA1c and the physical health domain (rs=-0.31, p<0001). There was also a weak correlation between the HbA1c and other domains: psychological (rs=-0.23, p<001), social relationships (rs=-0.15, p<005) and environmental (rs=-0.23, p<001).
Conclusion: This study showed that the German form of the WHOQOL-BREF is a valid instrument to evaluate the quality of life among Austrian patients with diabetes. There was a moderate to weak negative association between WHOQOL-BREF and HbA1c.
(Copyright © 2019 Primary Care Diabetes Europe. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)