Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Studies on the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) among elderly is very limited in the developing countries including Bangladesh. We assess the HRQOL among hospitalized elderly in Bangladesh by using WHOQOL-BREF and to validate it quantitatively with respect to internal consistency, domain structure, and discriminant validity. We conducted a hospital-based cross-sectional study among 566 elderly in Bangladesh. Data were collected using the World Health Organization Quality of Life BREF (WHOQOL-BREF). The socio-demographic, clinical conditions information’s were collected using structured questionnaire. A total of 566 randomly selected respondents were interviewed from two hospitals. 80.80% of elderly were young-old (60-69 years), followed by 12.9% were in middle-old (70-79 years). 74.12% of the respondent were from rural areas. The highest and the lowest mean scores of WHOQOL¬BREF domains was found for environmental health domain (mean = 20.38) and social relation domain (mean = 7.67) respectively. Overall quality of life was effected by the social, environmental, physical and psychological domains. Psychological domain strongly correlated with the environmental domain (0.80). Multiple linear regression revealed that age and sex are significantly associated with social relation domain (p<0.05). This study validates that the WHOQOL-BREF is acceptable and consistent for hospitalized elderly in Bangladesh. Low HRQOL in social domain and variation in HRQOL across socio-demographic characteristics can be increased by providing health education with respect to activity and environmental changes. Effective policy issues and measures are needed to address health related domains of the elderly people to increase health-related quality of life.