SU129. Transcultural Comparison of the Impact of Symptomatic Remission and Resilience on Health-Related Quality of Life in Patients Suffering From Serious Mental Illness

摘要

>Background: Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) refers to physical, social, well-being, and functional domains and is an increasingly important outcome measure of serious mental illness (SMI). >Methods: Focusing on transcultural differences, the current study used the WHOQOL-BREF to (1) compare HRQOL of clinically stable patients suffering from schizophrenia (N = 112) or bipolar I disorder (BD-I) (N = 120) with healthy control subjects (N = 137) from Western (Austria) and Eastern cultures (Japan) and (2) investigate whether symptomatic remission and resilience are relevant in this context. >Results: We detected a significant country effect with markedly lower HRQOL among Japanese subjects in general and a significantly higher degree of resilience in Austrian schizophrenia patients and healthy control subjects. Both Austrian patient groups and the Japanese schizophrenia group indicated significantly lower HRQOL and resilience compared to healthy control subjects. On the contrary, Japanese patients suffering from BD-I were comparable with control subjects in this regard. In both countries, nonremitted patients indicated significantly lower HRQOL than those who were symptomatically remitted. However, being free of mental illness/symptomatically remitted did not account for the observed cross-cultural and between-group differences in HRQOL. In addition, resilience was found to be a highly significant predictor of HRQOL in both countries and in all 3 groups and to be largely responsible for between-group differences in HRQOL. >Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate that even during periods of clinical stability HRQOL is significantly affected in individuals suffering from SMI and that individuals from Western European and Japanese cultures may have different needs in this regard. It remains to be studied whether interventions targeting the improvement of resilience might have a positive impact on patients’ HRQOL and whether the effects of such training programs might differ between diagnostic groups, remittedonremitted patients, and across cultures.