ABSTRACT
Nowadays diabetes mellitus is one of the most common chronic diseases, with an increasing incidence and prevalence in Iran and world wide. Improvement quality of life and health status are important factors for self management behaviors of diabetic patients. These behavior play an important role in prevention of acute and chronic complications of diabetes. This study has been conducted to evaluate correlation between quality of life and disease and demographic variables of diabetic patients. In this cross-sectional study participants were selected from diabetes clinics of four general hospitals of medical sciences universities in Tehran using convenience sampling. The demographic and disease characteristics questionnaire and also the short form health survey [SF-36] scale were used for data collection. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistic tests with SPSS software, windows version. 131 diabetic patients were participated in this study, 60.3% of subjects were female, 39.7% male with an average age of 47.3 +/- 12.7 years. The range of mean of quality of life scores in different domains varied from 46.2 +/- 13 for general health perceptions to 64.1 +/- 26.6 for physical functioning. There was a significant difference between age and physical functioning and role limitations due to emotional problem dimensions. There were significant differences between quality of life different, dimensions scores and variables of sex, educational level, type of diabetes and type of treatment. The statistical tests did not reveal significant correlations between other variables and quality of life different dimensions scores. The findings of this study showed that diabetes decreases the quality of life in diabetic patients. Difference between the results of this study- in comparison with other studies- indicates inversions cultural aspects of these diabetic patients. Cultural factors in the management of diabetes for improvement quality of life of such diabetic patients need to be considered