Quality of life of old people with osteoarthritis in Iraq

This study determined the quality of life of older adults with osteoarthritis in Iraq. We conducted this descriptive cross-sectional study with 150 patients diagnosed with osteoarthritis who applied to the Orthopedics and Traumatology Training policlinic in Iraq Al-Hussein Training Hospital between 15 March 2022 and 15 September 2022. We used Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests for data comparison and Kendall Tau-b correlation analysis to examine the relationship between scale scores. The values where p<0.05 was considered significant. According to the Osteoarthritis Quality of Life Scale (OAQoL), the patient's quality of life score levels were 33.2±6.8. When a correlation between osteoarthritis quality of life scale (OAQoL) and age was determined, a statistically significant strong correlation was observed in the negative direction (r= -0.539 ; p<0.0001). Our study found that the parameters of osteoarthritis related to demographic characteristics (gender, smoking, and income status) did not significantly affect the quality-of-life scale score. The study concluded that osteoarthritis has an age-related effect on the quality of life. Osteoarthritis is specifically age-related, and age-related aspects in the quality of life change accordingly. Our findings require support from other research with multicenter studies.