Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Diabetes with a high prevalence in Iran could affect all aspects of the individual life. Iranian people with diabetes living in rural area have access to health care system and family physician through the health care homes which offer health related care and education to the population. The services are provided by family physician and assistant health provider for remote rural area by weekly visiting tour to provide the opportunity to use health care system’s services. All the activities aim to improve QOL of people living in rural area special those living with diabetes. The information about the QOL in the population can be considered as baseline information.

Objective: The aim of the study was to access the QOL in the remote rural population of Malayer (a small town in the west of Iran) who live with diabetes.

Methods: In this descriptive study 39 people with type 2 diabetes participated who were visited by the family physician during weekly tour. The physician filled out the Iranian version of WHOQOL-BREEF for all.

Results: The participants were both male (46.2%) and female (53.8%) with the rage of 39–80 years old. Mean (S.D.) of domain scores of the aforementioned questionnaire in the population under study were 10.76 (S.D.=1.38) for physical health, 10.43 (S.D.=1.19) for psychological health, 10.28 (S.D.=1.64) for social relationships, and 10.51(S.D.=1.19) for environment. In analysis of different sex bands, scores of the environmental and physical health for female were significantly lower than male. In addition, people with higher education level had higher scores in the environmental and physical health. Moreover, there was no difference between marriage status and job of the population.

Conclusion: However the QOL of Iranian people with diabetes living in remote rural area were lower than the population studied by WHO in overall; the score of QOL in domains such as psychological and environmental was very close to the result in Argentina, India and USA.

Keywords: Quality of life, WHOQOL-BREEF, remote rural area, people with diabetes, Iran.

Declaration of interest: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of the research project.

Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sector.