Quality of life in stroke survivors

The aim of the study was to compare the quality of life among stroke survivors and healthy controls and to evaluate the influence of age, sex, and social and demographic factors on the quality of life. Contingent and methods. The case group consisted of 508 inhabitants of Kaunas city who were 25-84 years of age and had experienced their first stroke. The control group consisted of age- and sex-stratified randomly selected 508 stroke-free inhabitants of Kaunas city. The quality of life was evaluated using the SF-12 questionnaire. The study compared the quality of life between stroke survivors and controls in eight domains of quality of life and compared the evaluation of quality of life considering social and demographic features. Results. In the domain of physical and mental health, stroke survivors presented poorer evaluation of their quality of life compared to controls except for the evaluations of mental health in the age groups of 25-34 and 35-44 years. As compared to healthy controls, stroke survivors presented poorer evaluation of their quality of life in all domains except for pain. Only in the control group, females presented poorer evaluation of physical health, whereas no differences in the evaluation of mental health between sexes were found. The evaluation of physical health in both groups worsened with age. Both stroke survivors and controls presented better evaluation of their physical health if they were living not alone, were better educated, and were employed compared to those who were living alone, had poorer education level, and were unemployed. In addition, controls who were currently or previously engaged in mental work evaluated their physical health better. Conclusions. Stroke survivors presented poorer evaluations of their quality of life in both physical and mental health domains compared to controls. Only in the control group, females evaluated their physical health worse than males did. In both groups studied, poorer evaluation of physical health was associated with older age and lower social and demographic status. Relationship between mental health and subjects' social and demographic status was not statistically significant in either of the studied groups.