WHOQOL-BREF Hindi questionnaire: Quality of life assessment in acetabular fracture patients

Background: The incidence of acetabular fractures in India has increased over the past years but so has the operating skills of pelvi-acetabular trauma surgeons. The outcomes of surgical management need to be assessed so as to be able to devise proper treatment plan and execute the same during and after surgery, which in turn requires assessment of quality of life indices as well as functional scores. While there are studies assessing Harris Hip scores (HHS) and world health organization quality of life BREF (WHOQOL BREF) in the western population there is no study which assesses the same in Indian population. We designed this study to evaluate and define reference values for use of WHOQOL BREF Hindi scores in QOL Assessment in patients with acetabular fractures and to assess the relationship between it and HHS. Materials and Methods: 118 patients with acetabular fractures who were treated surgically were included in this retrospective study. Assessment of reduction quality (Matta's radiological criteria), clinical outcome (HHS) and functional outcome (WHOQOL-BREF score) were done. The affect of age, gender, fracture displacement, hip dislocation, delay in surgery and associated injury on the clinical and functional outcome was evaluated. Results: The mean HHS was 90.65 (42-100) which showed an overall good to excellent outcome in 78.8% cases. WHOQOL-BREF Hindi score of domain-one was 63.06 +/- 20.31 (13-94), of domain-two was 58.22 +/- 19.57 (13-100), of domain-three was 70.49 +/- 17.92 (13-100) and of domain-four was 64.48 +/- 18.46 (13-100), which showed significant functional deficit in domain-one (P = 0.0001) and domain-two (P = 0.0001) but not in domain-three (P = 0.458) and domain-four (P = 0.722) when compared to score of general healthy population. The domain scores of general population norms were achieved in 59.3%, 61.9%, 69.5% and 66.1% cases in domain one, two, three and four respectively. Conclusions: Based on these results one can conclude that WHOQOL-Hindi questionnaire is good enough for assessment of QOL in addition to clinical measures in acetabular fracture patients.