Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Uncertainty about symptoms can impact quality of life for Hepatitis C patients
By Kelly Shaw, DCRI Communications

Chronic Hepatitis C affects nearly 4 million Americans. Approximately half of those patients are not undergoing active treatment but still must regularly monitor their health with their physician.

A new study looks at how the lack of aggressive treatment for these patients contributes to uncertainty, anxiety, and depression in patients. The findings could help providers improve their patients' quality of life. The DCRI's Andrew Muir, MD, was one of the researchers.

The results appear in the March/April issue of Psychosomatics.

Many patients who have Hepatitis C do not actively treat the virus. Some because they don't have any symptoms and physicians are not certain of the benefits of therapy for these patients. Other patients have stopped treatment due to problems with side effects. Patients who are not undergoing active treatment for Hepatitis C typically meet with their physicians one or two times per year to monitor their health.

Watching and waiting for their condition to change or worsen can lead to illness-related uncertainty. Researchers evaluated four areas of uncertainty and how the different areas contribute to a patient's overall sense of fatigue, pain, depression, or quality of life.

The four factors are ambiguity, where patients don't know how to interpret new physical signs about how their illness might be progressing; complexity, when the instructions for managing the illness are hard to understand; inconsistency, when information from a healthcare provider is not consistent with what the patient was previously told; and unpredictability, when the present illness differs from a previous illness experience.

Researchers found that patients' ambiguity about their illness was associated more strongly with signs of depression, poor quality of life, and fatigue. The study suggests that helping patients better understand sometimes vague physical symptoms of their condition would help improve some of the quality of life issues.

Read the full article for details and further recommendations.