Quality of Life among Patients with Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar Disorder is a major psychiatric disorder. It has a chronic course of remitting and relapsing episodes of mania and depression and tends to deteriorate mental and cognitive functions of patients. This disorder affects deeply the function and feelings of subjects and impacts negatively on quality of life. We found out the quality of life in patients with Bipolar Disorder with that of general population and order of impairment among domain of physical health, psychological health, social relationship and environment domain. This was a descriptive, cross-sectional, comparative and analytical study. The study was conducted in the department of Psychiatry, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University (BSMMU), Dhaka, Bangladesh from January 2015 to October 2016. Eighty (80) patients with Bipolar Disorder who fulfilled inclusion criteria were selected as sample from department of psychiatry in BSMMU and National Institute of Mental Health, Dhaka. Clinical diagnosis of patients was done by consultant psychiatrist with Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID-I CV). Then Bengali version of WHO Quality of Life Scale brief version (WHOQOL BREF 1998) was applied to evaluate quality of life in different domains including physical health, psychological health, social relationship and environment domain. Semi structural questionnaire were used for collecting sociodemographic information. In this process of study age and sex matched 80 healthy controls from hospital staff and patient's attendants without physical or psychiatric illness were recruited for comparison. Data were analyzed by Statistical Package for Social Science Version 16. The study revealed that mean score of overall quality of life of patients were 3.11 and healthy controls were 3.95, mean score of overall health of patients were 2.94 and healthy control were 3.88, mean score of physical health domain of patients were 3.14 and healthy control were 4.00, mean score of psychological domain of patients were 3.01 and healthy control were 3.87, mean score of social relationship domain of patients were 2.31 and healthy control were 3.72, mean score of environment domain of patients were 2.73 and healthy control were 3.35. Among patients quality of life showed impaired in low socio-economic condition. Result of this study may help to encourage further research.