The relationships between disability level, health-promoting lifestyle, and quality of life in outpatients with systemic lupus erythematosus

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between disability, health-promoting lifestyle and quality of life in SLE outpatients. Cross-sectional research design and purposive sampling were used in this study. One hundred and twenty-nine SLE outpatients from a medical center were sampled. Questionnaires, including the Visual Analogue Scale, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, were adopted in order to survey subject disabilities in terms of pain, fatigue, quality of sleep, anxiety, and depression. Health-promoting lifestyle was measured using the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile, while quality of life data were collected using Short-Form 36. Hierarchical regressions and a Sobel test were the major statistical procedures employed. Study results indicated that SLE patient self-reported pain and fatigue related to the SLE disease to be 27.7 ± 26.2 and 37.4 ± 26.6, respectively. Seventy-two percent of SLE patients were reported to be troubled by poor sleep quality, while 20% 32% suffered from severe anxiety and depression. The Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile total score for SLE patients was 61.5 ± 17.2. In terms of SLE patient quality of life (QOL), physical component summary (PCS) and mental component summary (MCS) scores were 45.3 ± 9.1 and 43.8 ± 9.7, respectively. Based on the hierarchical regressions and Sobel test, it was revealed that the health-promoting lifestyle has no significant effect on the physical component summary (p > ․05). Fatigue was the mediator factor of health-promoting lifestyle to physical component summary of quality of life. Nevertheless, health-promoting lifestyle has a significant effect on the mental component summary (p < ․05). Interestingly, the results showed facilitating health- promoting lifestyle in SLE patient could not enhance physical component summary of quality of life directly without an improvement in fatigue disability; however, facilitating health-promoting lifestyle had a direct and positive effect on the mental component summary of quality of life.