Background. Eastern Indonesia has relatively lower life expectancy, however elderly population is also growing rapidly nevertheless little is known about their elderly health condition and quality of life. Non-communicable disease is known to drastically decrease the quality of life, this study conducted in order to examine the relationship of the quality of life in elderly population in Ende Tengah related to their non-communicable disease status.
Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted in 120 elderly in Ende Tengah district. The demographic, SF-36 and NCDs questionnaires were used in order to collect the data. Bivariate and multivariate analysis were implemented to showed the association.
Results. There are 120 erderly with average age 68.28 + 6.78 years, the range of age is 60-86 years, with 60-69 years range dominate (60%) and mostly women (55%). The level of education is quite low with the most elementary school composition of 43%, 83% not working and have no income, 67% of working elderly have low income. The characteristic of NCDs are dominated by hypertension (43%) and joint disorders (38%), followed by hypercholesterolemia (29%), COPD (13%), diabetes mellitus (11%), stroke (10%), heart disease (8%) and cancer (3%).Poor quality of life is dominated by role limitations due to physical problems (59%), followed by role limitations due to emotional problems (50%), general health perceptions (30%), physical functioning (21%), bodily pain (21%), vitality (19%), social functioning (11%), and general mental health (3%). Chi-square test results showed that there are significant correlation between NCDs with the quality of life in elderly (P=0.04) and between NCDs frequency with the quality of life in elderly (P=0.005) the results still significant even if the risk factor variables are included in the model using Binomial Logistic Regression.
Conclusion. Non-communicable diseases and its comorbidities are greatly affect to the decrease of the quality of life in elderly in Ende Tengah. This finding emphasize the importance of taking care of the elderly health condition and the needs to promote the non-communicable disease prevention strategy in the area. |