Abstract
Background: End stage renal disease is a chronic disease that exerts a great negative impact on patients’ health-related quality of life. Objectives:To assess the health related quality of life (HRQOL) of adult Libyan patients undergoinghemodialysisand to explore the association between the HRQOL and patients’ sociodemographic and clinical characteristics Materials and Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out at hemodialysis unit in the National Heart Center, Tripoli. QOL was assessed using the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire. Analysis was performed using SPSS (version 22) package. Appropriate inferential statistics was used with 0.05 level of significance. Results: The mean scores were low for the four QOL subdomains (56.58±12.67), the physical domain was the most affected (53.45±15.98) and the social domain was the least affected (60.33±19.96). There was significant positive association between educational level, working status, and hemoglobin level withQOL (P= 0.001, P=0.025,P=0.027respectively). Multiple linear regression revealed that high level of education was the only predicator for QOL in this study (P=0.003). Conclusion:Patients with chronic kidney disease on dialysis had an overall low QOL and low scores of the four domains.The highest QOL score was for the social and psychological domains and the lowest was for the physical domainand environmental domains.Higher level of education, working status, and hemoglobin level were the significant factors that affected the QOL. High level of education was the only positive predicator for QOL. Key Word:Hemodialysis, Quality of life, WHOQOL-BREF, Libya