Comparison of quality of life in low back pain patients and healthy subjects by using WHOQOL-BREF

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Low back pain and consequence disability is one of the most prevalence musculoskeletal disorders that human being ever had involved. Quality of life is a multidimensional concept and is beyond absolute physical health. In this study, we compared QOL between low back pain patients and healthy people using WHOQOL-BREF which is a generic and overall instrument. METHODS: This descriptive-analytic study was carried out on 256 low back pain patients and healthy people in Shahid Beheshti Hospital, Babol. They filled out the questionnaires personally and the scores of different domains in two groups were compared. WHOQOL-BREF has four domains of physical health, psychological health, social relations and environment health. The range of scores in each of these domains is from 4-20. The two questions are about the general quality of life and general health. Overall, a higher score indicates better quality of life. RESULTS: The participants' age range was from 18 to 63 with the mean +/- SD of 36.63 +/- 10.99. The scores of these four domains and general quality of life and general health of WHOQOL-BREF were lower in low back pain patients. These differences were statistically significant in physical health and environmental health. CONCLUSIONS: Lower QOL in low back pain patients necessitate doing some interventions such as education and rehabilitation in this group. This indicates the importance of more attention to these patients to plan future treatments in order to reinforce these domains.