SPIRITUAL PERSPECTIVE AND HEALTH-RELATED QUALITY OF LIFE OF DIALYZED PATIENTS

Objective: To compare and correlate the spiritual perspective with health related quality of life in patients with chronic renal disease (CRD) undergoing hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis. Methods: Cross-sectional comparative study in a random sample of 100 patients, 50 on hemodialysis and 50 on peritoneal dialysis who were treated in the Fresenius renal Unit in Cucuta, Colombia in 2013. The Following tools were used: Spiritual Perspective Reed Scale andSF-36 to measure health -related quality of life. The comparisons were made with the Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis test, and the correlation with Sperman. Results: No significant differences were found regarding spiritual perspective among the groups of patients who were studied according to age, time at diagnosis, socio-economic level or marital status, but we found differences with regards to gender and type of treatment, being larger in female cases and in peritoneal dialyzed patients. A weak and inverse relation regarding quality of life was found concerning health and age, larger health related quality of life in single persons and lack of relation between quality of life and other variables. Conclusions: In this study we observed that spiritual perspectives were high in persons on dialysis treatment, being higher in those who receive peritoneal dialysis. Spiritual perspective and health related quality of life are related positively and significantly in patients with CRF on peritoneal dialysis but not in the hemodialysis group.