Disease characteristics and psychosocial factors: Explaining the expression of quality of life in childhood epilepsy

ObjectivesTo explore, identify and understand the contribution that biomedical and psychosocial factors make to the assessment of health-related quality of life (HRQL) of children and youth with epilepsy using the CHEQOL-25.MethodsWe identified and measured variables that may influence HRQL; grouped the variables into four conceptual categories; and used simple and hierarchical linear regressions to model CHEQOL-25 as a function of these variable groupings. Participants were 8-15 year olds with epilepsy and their parents.Results131 child and parent pairs participated. Overall, the unique variances associated with the biomedical and psychosocial variables are R2 = 0.22 and 0.29, respectively, for child self-reported HRQL and R2 = 0.11 and 0.13, respectively, for parent-proxy report.ConclusionsThis study increases our understanding of factors that contribute to the expression of HRQL in this population. These results should be interpreted with caution due to the limited sample size and large number of variables.