Abstract
Introduction: Due to advances in diagnosis and treatment, people with pulmonary hypertension (PH) are now living longer. PH has become a chronic rather than an acute disease and instead of focussing solely on mortality, attention to quality of life and movements to incorporate more than just medical models of illness are becoming more appropriate.
Objective: The study was designed to investigate the psychological factors affecting people with PAH, IPAH and CTEPH. It aimed to examine the differences between the groups in their relationships between hope, optimism and health-related quality of life (HRQoL), as very little research is available on the psychological predictor variables of HRQoL in the PH population.
Method: 99 people with PH (81.7% female and 18.3% male) aged between 18 and 79 took part in the cross-sectional research by completing an online questionnaire about their experiences of living with PH. This included the Herth Hope Index, Life Orientation Test-Revised (optimism scale) and emPHasis-10 (HRQoL scale), as well as specific questions about their illness.
Results: Analysis showed that people with IPAH had significantly better HRQoL than people with PAH (p=0.021). People with IPAH also were found to be more optimistic than people with CTEPH (p=0.015). No statistically significant differences were found in levels of hope between the groups.
Conclusion: People with IPAH were more optimistic and had better HRQoL than the other disease groups. Further research is needed to investigate these links in order to infer causation. Experimentation is required to assess the possibility of manipulating psychological variables in attempts to improve HRQoL in other groups of PH.
- Copyright ©the authors 2016