The effects of physical and social health components on quali?ty of life in Turkish mothers with disabled children

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Parenting children who are physically or intellectually impaired is known to be linked to the impaired well-being of the parent’s themselves.Parents face a number of common tasks in managing their child's afflicted health.However, there is still little available data on quality of life (QOL) in parents of disabled children in Turkey. This cross- sectional study was conducted to describe the effects of some variables, which would interfere with the general health, on QOL of mothers with disabled children (MDC). METHOD: Three hundred and seventy two MDC living in the Western of Turkey region with a mean age of 34,73± 7,5 years completed the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36).All gave their informed consent for participating to the study. We also recorded demographics of the MDC. The effects of 10 variables such as; motor developmental level of children, low back pain (LBP), gender of child, clinical type of disability of child, exercise habit of mother, educational level of mother (ELM), occupation of mother, involved extremities of child (IEC), age of mother (AM),and parity on four domains of the SF- 36 including, general health (GH), physical functioning (PF), emotional well being (EWB), and social functioning (SF) were analyzed using backward multiple linear regression. RESULTS:LBP and ELM were found as common significant variables affecting the QOL of MDC regarding the following domains; GH, PF, and EWB. However, LBP and ELM were not found as significant variables for the SF domain. IEC and AM were found as significant variables for the SF domain. CONCLUSION: In our context, we found that LBP is the most common significant factor affecting QOL of the MDC in the sample. Since, MDC have to adapt to new roles, reorganize their lives and cope with care, parents with disabled children, especially mothers may benefit from an intensive family competence programme.