Quality of life and self-esteem in Hemophilic children and adolescents

ABSTRACT

Background: The present study aimed to assess of quality of life and self esteem and to discover the relation of both to the clinical and therapeutic parameters in children with hemophilia. To achieve this target, 100 hemophilic children were included in the study. They had a mean age of 10.091 4.44. They were subjected to careful history taking and thorough clinical examination. In addition, they were subjected QOL and self esteem assessment. It was shown that 48% of the studied children are obese, the most commonly encountered manifestation was target joint 75.0% followed by gum bleeding 72%, circumcision bleeding 69.0%, epistaxis 54.0%, hemartherosis 50.0% muscle hematoma 49.0%, dental bleeding 45%, and limited joint movement 33.0%. Regarding the QOL, the present study found that it is clear that the studied children had generally poor quality of life domain. This is manifested by the mean total QOL score which is only 50.9, comparison between individual and total QOL scores in the studied age groups had revealed that children of the middle age had significantly better QOL scores when compared with the other two groups. The relatively poor QOL scores in the present study is explained by the higher frequency of joint problems which had detrimental effects on the studied children physical health and other QOL domains. Also patients with joint problems including hemartherosis, target joint and limited joint movement had significantly worse QOL score when compared with patients without, assessing patients self-esteem reveled significantly lower Coppersmith self-esteem inventory in patients when compared with controls, obese children had significantly lower self esteem scores when compared with children with normal weight. Finally, we showed a statistically significant inverse correlation between self esteem and QOL