ABSTRACT
Background: HIV today is one of the worst pandemic diseases. Unlike terminal illnesses, HIV patients have to live for decades with the disease, which now shifts the interest to the quality of their life. The present study was planned, considering a necessity to inquire about the quality of life of patients taking Antiretroviral therapy in Mysore, various coping strategies prevalent among them and correlation between the two.Methods: This cross sectional study was done on 150 adults coming for anti retroviral therapy (ART), diagnosed with HIV at least 6 months back. ART centre was approached with required permissions. After explaining the study purpose, data was collected on paper with due consent from patients. Standard WHO QOL BREF and COPE carver Bref were used as questionnaire instruments. Analysis was done using SPSS software and Pearson’s correlation was used.Results: Analysis revealed that the most affected domain in quality of life was social domain with mean=11.75±2.12 (4-20 scale) and least affected was environmental with mean14.49±0.849. Self distraction was coping strategy of the highest prevalence (mean=4.98) having no correlation with QOL. Active coping showed positive correlation under all domains while behavioural disengagement and substance abuse had significant negative correlation overall (p value<0.001).Conclusions: Our study underlined a gap in Social domain of selected HIV affected population. Self distraction was the most preferred style of coping and humour was found to be least adopted method. Active coping had linear relationship all the 4 domains whereas behavioural disengagement showed significant lowering in QOL as a whole.