الفهرس 
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Abstract
The chronic nature of ESRD necessitates an understanding by health care professionals of how the illness and its treatment impact the daily lives of patients. Despite amazing advances in medical knowledge and technology, ESRD encroaches on every aspect of patients’ lives. Health care professionals have no direct involvement with most of these aspects. Measurement of general health status and HRQOL provide some insight into patients’ social and psychological aspects as well as functional capacities, and assist patients to cope with their illness and its treatment. When there is no cure for a chronic illness, an essential healthcare goal must be to maximize QOL.
Along with survival and other types of clinical outcomes, patients QOL are an important indicator of the effectiveness of the medical care they receive. It provides important information about the impact of ESRD and its treatment on daily life. HRQOL assessment is used in patient care to screen for potential problems, to prioritize problems, to facilitate communication between health care workers and patients, and to monitor changes or response to treatment.
Study objectives
This study was conducted to assess HRQOL of HD patients and its determinants namely socio-demographic characteristics as well as some clinical characteristics.
Subjects and Methods
All HD patients treated at the Dialysis Unit, Abou-kir central hospital, Alexandria, during the period from the beginning of May 2015 to the end of August 2015 were included in the study.
An official approval for conducting the study was obtained from the head of the Dialysis Unit, Abou-kir central hospital, Alexandria. Patients were informed about the purpose of the study, an informed consent was obtained from all eligible patients before enrollment.
Data were collected, using a structured interview questionnaire on baseline socio-demographic characteristics, clinical profile and dialysis characteristics. Patient’s weight and height were assessed to calculate BMI. Patients’ records were reviewed to obtain relevant clinical and duration of haemodialysis.
WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire was used for assessing the QOL of participants. It contained 4 domains (physical, psychological, social, and environment). The mean score of items within each domain is used to calculate the domain score. To make domain scores comparable with the scores used in the WHOQOL-100, raw scores were converted to transformed score to enable comparisons to be made between domains composed of unequal numbers of items. The QOL score (70%) was used as the cut-off level for classification of participants into patients with poor QOL (less than 70%) and good with QOL (≥ 70%).
A pilot study was conducted to pretest the data collection tools and reactions of the study subjects to the research procedures.
Data were analyzed using the Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS ver.18). The mean, standard deviation, were computed. HRQOL was modeled in a linear regression as a function of patient’s demographic characteristics, clinical profile and duration of dialysis. Significance of the obtained results was judged at the 5% level.