Quality of life and social support in congestive heart failure patients‏ ‏and healthy ‎people

Introduction: Congestive heart failure (CHF) is one of the most important chronic diseases in the &lrm;world that these patients are faced with various physical and psychological stressful factors which &lrm;leads to decreasing quality of life. Social support by all sources can lead to decreasing problems in &lrm;CHF patients and increasing quality of life in them &nbsp;Objective: The aim of study was to determine quality of life in CHF patients and comparing it with &lrm;QOL of healthy people and also determine the social support of CHF patients, and measuring the &lrm;relationship between QOL and social support in CHF patients. &lrm; &nbsp;Methods: This is a correlationalstudy and samples were chosen by simple sampling. For this &lrm;purpose, &lrm;&rlm;125&rlm;&lrm; eligible CHF patients who referred to hospitals in city of Maragheh, and &lrm;&rlm;125&rlm;&lrm; healthy &lrm;people were selected simultaneously during a period of ten months. Data were collected using an &lrm;integrated three part questionnaire including demographics, quality of life, and social support &lrm;completed by interview. Data after collection were analyzed using SPSS (Ver.&lrm;&rlm;15&rlm;&lrm;), descriptive &lrm;statistics (Mean. Median, Frequency, Standard Deviation) and Inferential statistics (T-independent &lrm;test, Chi-square, Exact Fisher test, Pearson correlational test, Multiple Regression.&lrm; &nbsp;Results: Findings indicated that quality of life was undesirable in &lrm;&rlm;49.6%&rlm;&lrm; and had significant &lrm;difference with QOL of healthy people(P<&lrm;&rlm;0.0001&rlm;&lrm;). In subsectors of quality of life, social dimension &lrm;was desirable in &lrm;&rlm;83.2%&rlm;&lrm; of patients and showed no significant difference with healthy people, while &lrm;in physical dimension (&lrm;&rlm;63.2%&rlm;&lrm;) and psychological dimension (&lrm;&rlm;63.2%&rlm;&lrm;) in most of the patients were &lrm;undesirable and in most of the healthy people were desirable. Social support in &lrm;&rlm;51.2%&rlm;&lrm; of CHF &lrm;patients were desirable, and there was a direct and significant relationship between these two &lrm;variables (p<&lrm;&rlm;0.03&rlm;&lrm;, r = &lrm;&rlm;0.2&rlm;&lrm;). &nbsp;&lrm; Conclusion: In attention to positive relationship between QOL and social support it is suggested &lrm;that health care planners and managers in addition to increasing instrumental supports, emotional &lrm;and informational support should be promoted in order to improve patients&rsquo; quality of life. &lrm;