Health-related quality of life in community dwelling patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease

BackgroundGiven the complexity of Alzheimer's disease (AD), it is a key object to explore broad outcomes, such as patient health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in relation to other variables including the feeling of burden experienced by caregivers.MethodsValidated tests and questionnaires were used in this survey for the assessment of clinical variables of patients, the severity of the caregiver burden, and the measurement of the HRQoL of mild-to-moderate AD patients. This study was carried on also in order to evaluate the appropriateness of the questionnaires (DEMQOL and DEMQOL-Proxy) utilized in measuring HRQoL in AD and of their capability to identify whether there is agreement between ratings obtained by patients and caregivers.ResultsThe amount of burden for caregivers was found to be positively correlated with several measures of cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and motor impairment of the patients. Carers evaluated HRQoL worse than AD sufferers. A significant correlation was demonstrated between the caregiver stress and severity of depressive symptoms in the patients. The DEMQOL-PROXY was found to be significantly correlated with the patient level of depressive symptoms.ConclusionsDepressive symptoms mostly worsen the caregiver tolerability of the patient mental impoverishment. It is of great importance to assess patients with mild-to-moderate AD carefully in terms of depressive symptoms because they may have a great clinical implication. There was relatively low agreement between ratings concerning HRQoL obtained by patients and caregivers despite the capacity of the questionnaire to yield many clinical shades concerning the patient HRQoL.