The effect of liver transplant patients' compliance with immunosuppressive treatment on quality of life

This study was conducted to examine the effect of liver transplant patients' compliance with immunosuppressive treatment on their quality of life. The research was conducted as a descriptive cross-sectional study between August 2023 and November 2023 at İnönü University Liver Transplant Institute with 164 patients who met the research criteria. "Patient Information Form", "Immunosuppressive Treatment Compliance Scale", "Short Form-36 (SF-36) Quality of Life Scale" were used to collect the data of the study. Percentage, mean, Manny Whitney, Kruskall Wallis and Chi-square tests were used to evaluate the data. It was determined that the average age of the participants was 51.32±13.87 years, the majority of them were male, and the majority of the individuals received primary and secondary education. Liver transplant patients' education level, gender, smoking and alcohol use, height, weight, time since transplantation, number of medications taken daily, marital status, age, disease requiring continuous medication use, monthly income, and status of receiving immunosuppressive medication training. It was determined that there was no statistically significant relationship between the mean scores of the Immunosuppressive Treatment Compliance Scale (ITUS) according to diseases such as diabetes, asthma, hypertension (p>0.05). It has been determined that there is a relationship between the "Pain" sub-dimension of the SF-36 scale and the presence of Asthma (COPD) in patients with liver transplantation, and between the "Pain" sub-scores of the SF-36 Quality of Life sub-dimensions and gender (p< 0.05). It was determined that there was a statistical relationship between the "Pain" sub-score of the SF-36 Quality of Life sub-dimensions and gender (p<0.05). In our study, it was determined that there was a statistically significant difference between the ages and education levels of liver transplant patients and the mean scores of "Physical Function" and "Physical Role Difficulty" sub-dimensions of the SF-36 Quality of Life scale (p<0.05). Among the SF-36 scale sub-dimensions, only the "Vitality" sub-dimension was found to have a low and significant relationship with the Immunosuppressive Treatment Compliance Scale (p<0.05). There was no relationship between the other sub-dimensions of SF-36 Quality of Life and the Immunosuppressive Treatment Compliance Scale (p>0.05).