Endocrine Abstracts

Quality of Life (QoL) is a very important issue in the management of a chronic disease like acromegaly. Recently the AcroQol questionnaire was developed to evaluate the QoL in different acromegalic populations. We decided to compare the scores of AcroQol and 2 other different questionnaires: one related to general well-being (SF-36) and the other to evaluate depression (BDI). We preformed a cross-sectional evaluation of a sample of 60 Portuguese acromegalics, 20 men and 40 women, with an average age of 52.7 y, and mean disease duration of 11.2 y followed at the Department of Endocrinology. We defined controlled disease (CA) as normal IGF-1 for age and sex, and GH levels lower than 1 ng/ml during OGTT and 75% of the samples of a 12 hours profile lower than 1 ng/ml. 51 patients were submitted to surgery, 31 to radiotherapy and 29 to medical therapy (octreotide n=20, and lanreotide n=9), and 4 were naive. Twenty-nine patients presented hypopituitarism. Fifty patients were considered controlled and the other 10 uncontrolled. The results are presented as mean+S.D., compared using either Student’s t or Mann-Whitney test as appropriated, and correlation was evaluated using Pearson test. The total score of AcroQol was 49.9+19.3 and had an alpha Cronbach reliability and internal consistency of 0.92. The total score is significantly correlated with SF-36 score (107.7+11.3, r=0.71) and negatively with the BDI score (16.5+13.1, r=−0.76). The AcroQol total score of CA was not significantly different from the uncontrolled ones (UCA) (50.9+19.4 vs 45.2+19.1). The same was observed regarding the AcroQol physical scale (CA 47.6+25.8 vs UCA 44.1+25.1) and psychological scale (CA 52.9+18.5 vs UCA 45.9+20.3), although CA tended to be better than UCA. The discrepancy with the previously presented results may be explained by a high number of patients with hypopituitarism. We conclude that the Portuguese version of AcroQol is a valuable tool to evaluate the QoL of acromegalic patients but hypopituitarism could be a confounding factor.