engleski

Quality of life in epileptic children

During the last decade, awareness of the importance of including the health-related quality of life assessment as a measure of therapeutic success has been considerably developed. Health-related quality of life implies functional effects of disease and its treatment on the patients as perceived by the patient. Most studies of the quality of life epileptic patients have been focused on adult population. For the time being, little attention is paid to the care of a child suffering from epilepsy concerning his daily but highly relevant aspects of life: school, trips and vacation, entertainments and peer relations. One of the reasons for such a situation certainly is difficult data collection from children because of their limited cognitive and expression potential. Studies show that a childe of only 7-8 years of age is able to provide relevant data by use of a questionnaire. As the core of the term quality of life in each individual is his own, subjective experience of satisfaction, we have designed a health questionnaire directed towards the quality of life in children. The questionnaire contains 42 questions on the following aspects of daily functioning of an epileptic child: physical activity, emotional experience, social relationships in close and wide social environment, education, and experience and acceptance of treatment. Preliminary results obtained by use of the questionnaire in a group of children with epilepsy are presented. Upon testing of the metric characteristics (objectivity, validity, discriminativness) of the newly designed questionnaire, its use will allow for fast identifications of those aspects of life that experienced by the diseased child as limited due to his disease. This will than help correctly focus the procedures of psychological support to a chronically ill child and his family, and improve their compliance with treatment.

quality of life; epilepsy; children

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