Background
Quality of life (QoL) is defi ned as "a patient's subjective evaluation of his life situation". QoL evaluation is carried out by means of generic and specifi c questionnaires. Generic QoL questionnaires generally evaluate a patient's overall condition regardless of his disease. Specifi c QoL questionnaires are designed to evaluate a patient's overall condition for a particular type of disease.
Aim
The study analyses the effect of selected psychosocial and health aspects on quality of life in patients with multiple myeloma and malignant lymphoma undergoing autologous progenitor stem cell transplantation.
Materials/Methods
The total number of respondents undergoing transplantation between 2001 and 2003 was 56:32 respondents (18 male and 14 female) with multiple myeloma, and 24 respondents (11 male and 13 female) with malignant lymphoma. The average age of patients with multiple myeloma was 60 years and the average age of patients with malignant lymphoma was 44.5 years. The Czech version of the international generic European Quality of Life Questionnaire, Version EQ-5D, was used. The effect of selected psychosocial and health aspects (age, sex, level of education, marital status, number of associated diseases, smoking abuse, religion, type of disease and time since the transplantation) on quality of life in patients was determined by means of analysis of variance.
Results
The above-mentioned aspects proved statistically signifi cant dependence of quality of life on age, smoking abuse in patients with multiple myeloma and on type of disease. EQ-5D score (dimensions of quality of life) and EQ-5D VAS (subjective health condition) signifi cantly decrease with increasing age in both groups