Depression and quality of life in patients on long term hemodialysis at a nationalhospital in Ghana: a cross-sectional study

摘要

In addition, complications of hemodialysis (i.e., hypotension, headache and air embolism) may contribute to diminished working capacity and adversely affect individual productivity.~(7) Factors such as financial dependence, inability to carry out family responsibilities, and engage in active social life, have been attributed to reduced quality of life in patients on long-term hemodialysis. These factors may result in mental health issues such as depression, anxiety and impaired cognition.~(8)SPSS statistical software version 20.0 was used for data cleaning and analysis. Categorical variables were analyzed and presented as frequencies and percentages. The continuous variables were presented as means and standard deviations. Preliminary analyses were conducted to ascertain the normality of the data. The results showed that all the variables (depression, the total and domain scores of QoL) had skewness and kurtosis values that fell within +2 and 2, thus, indicating that the data was close to normal in line with the criteria proposed by George and Mallery.~(21) Inferential statistics were carried out using the independent sample t-test to compare participants with differences in demographic characteristics on scores of depression, overall QoL and the four domains of QoL. Bonferroni adjustment was used to adjust the alpha level for the results of the t-test to 0.008 in order to control for Type I error due to multiple analyses. In addition, the Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to compute the relationship between symptoms of depression, quality of life, dialysis treatment duration and income. Standard linear multiple regression was used to explore selected variables that would predict overall quality of life. Significance level for all other analysis was set at a p-value less than 0.05.