Assessing the relationship between health literacy and quality of life in chronic kidney disease patients

Background and Objective: Over the last decade, there has been an increase in people undergoing haemodialysis for chronic kidney disease. This increase has led to many questions about the health literacy and quality of life of these patients. The main objective of this study is to assessing the association between health literacy level and quality of life of chronic kidney patients undergoing regular haemodialysis. <br /> Materials and methods: It is a cross-sectional study that took place from March 1, 2022, to April 30 of the same year. We assessed health literacy using the HHL-EU-PT assessment instrument and quality of life using the KDQOL-SF. The sample consisted of 268 patients aged between 25 and 90 years from 7 haemodialysis clinics in Portugal. Data analysis was conducted using SPSS version 26.0. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to evaluate the normality of variable distributions, and the T-test was used to compare the dimensions of the Health Literacy scale and KDQOL-SF with dichotomous categorical variables.<br /> Results: The application of the KDQOL-SF, we found that the dimensions with the best scores were encouragement from dialysis staff (82.46) and social support (77.49). Overall, we found an association between the medium score of literacy and patients' quality of life: for each additional point in health literacy, the quality-of-life score increased by 0.78 points (p<0.001). <br /> Conclusions: Therefore, improving the level of health literacy may be a possible strategy for improving quality of life for CKD patients.