Functional and psychosocial impact of oral disorders and quality of life of people living with HIV/AIDS

This study compared the Quality of Life (QOL) according to the presence of functional and psychosocial impact of oral disorders and evaluated the convergent validity between the dimensions of the WHOQOL and the OHIP-14 scores among people living with HIV. This was a cross-sectional study with patients enrolled in reference centres of a midsize Brazilian city. Interviews were conducted when the participants arrived at the centres seeking services for medical appointments and collecting medicines. The OHIP-14 was used to evaluate the functional and psychosocial impact of oral disorders. QOL was assessed using the general issues and six domains of the WHOQOL-HIV BREF. The Chi square test, Mann-Whitney test, and Spearman correlation analysis were used for analysis. The sample comprised 422 people living with HIV/AIDS (response rate: 81.2 %). The prevalence of functional and psychosocial impact of oral disorders was 34.0 %. The prevalence of very poor/poor QOL and those who were very dissatisfied/dissatisfied with their health was higher among those with functional and psychosocial impact of oral disorders. There was a negative correlation between the scores on the domains of QOL and the severity of the impact of the oral disorders (r-value ranged from -0.107 to -0.30). Individuals with functional and psychosocial impact of oral disorders were found to more frequently rate their QOL as poor/very poor, and were more often dissatisfied with health. The correlation between the scores of QOL and functional and psychosocial impact of oral disorders scores was weak, indicating that they represent different constructs. The measures of functional and psychosocial impact of oral disorders should be complemented by general measures of QOL.