Qualidade de vida relacionada em cuidadores de crianças e adolescentes com autismo

Abstract

The autism is a psychiatric chronic disorder that can cause physical and emotional overload to the relatives. But the repercussion on the health related quality of life (HRQoL) of the caregiver was not studied. The objective of this study was to value the HRQoL of the caregivers of children and adolescents with autism using the 36 - item Shorts Form Heath Survey Questionnaire (SF-36). There were invited to participate to the study caregivers of children and adolescents from 5 to 20 years old with autism diagnosis, in treatment in the Centro de Atendimento Psicossocial (CAPSi) from Uberlandia, Uberlandia MG. The control group was constituted of caregivers of children and adolescents without chronic disease, deriving from public and particular schools from Uberlandia with same age. The demographic and clinical variables were obtained by interview with the caregiver and completed with informations contained in the medical handbook. The SF-36 was applied in the institution by the technique of interview. The Mann-Whitney test was used to compare the scores from the study and control groups, and to compare the individuals of the study group according to the gender and age of the patient (child versus adolescent). The Spearman´s correlation coefficient was used to correlate the demographic variables (age of the patient, age of the caregiver, familiar income, number of children). Take part in study 25 caregivers in the study group and 283 in the control group. The majority of the caregivers was the mothers (84% in the study group and 67,8% in the control group) and hers age alternate to 20 from 63 age (mean = 37,6 and SD = 12). In the study group the scores were lower than in the control in the physical and mental domains(p <0,05). The scores of the caregivers of the masculine gender were lower than those of the feminine gender for the components and most of the domains from SF-36, however only in the pain domain the difference was significant (p = 0,046). Caregivers of adolescents with autism obtained lower scores than the caregivers of children with autism, but this difference was statistic significant only in the domain of functional capacity (p = 0,01) and emotional aspects (p = 0,04). The age of the caregiver, the economic situation and the number of son/daughter were not correlated with the SF-36 scores. A negative multidimensional impact on HRQoL of the caregivers of autistic children/adolescents was shown, with higher repercussion if patients on the masculine gender or adolescent. This results become stronger the need of a major attention to the health of these persons, in a multidimensional approach.