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Health Related Quality of Life of Urban Young Adults Misusing Analgesics Participating in a Controlled, Cross-sectional Study in East Sikkim, North East India
FC05-FC09
Correspondence
Dr. Sunil Kumar Pandey,
Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacology, Gayatri Vidya Parishad Institute of Health Care and Medical Technology,
Visakhapatnam-530048, Andhra Pradesh, India.
E-mail: sunilmanipal@gmail.com
Introduction: A great deal of interest exists in assessing the health related Quality of Life (QoL) as an important aspect of treatment effectiveness with prescription drug misuse. The SF-36 Health Survey is a self-report measure assessing subjective health status along with physical and mental health domains.
Aim: To evaluate how analgesic misuse affects both physical and emotional QoL in an urban area of Sikkim in a young adult population (15-40 years of age) of either sex.
Materials and Methods: This study was a cross-sectional general population survey. Proposed study site included an urban area in East Sikkim. A pre-devised questionnaire of SF-36 was administered to 700 subjects. Data were statistically analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences software version 20.0.
Results: Significant difference among analgesic misusers and non misusers in measures like general health (?2=17.197, df=2, p<0.001), compared to one year ago, health condition now (?2=8.379, df=2, p=0.015), emotional health-depression (?2=13.811, df=2, p=0.001), emotional health-full of life (?2=8.998, df=2, p=0.011), emotional health-felt dumped (?2=6.065, df=2, p=0.048), emotional health-energy (?2=13.190, df=2, p=0.001), emotional health-worn out (?2=6.325, df=2, p=0.042) was found.
Conclusion: This study could identify a subset of participants in their youth with current pain and several measures of low QoL in emotional domain like depression, full of life, energy; felt dumped, worn out in the past four weeks in subjects misusing analgesics. Low QoL also identifies possibility of future onset of mental and psychiatric impairments.