Assessment of the quality of life of Iraqi children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis: A single-center study

Abstract

Background: Even with the rapid advancement in the treatment of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), most affected children still suffer from remarkable degree of discomfort and reduced functional capacity. As such, many instruments have been invented to evaluate the quality of life (QoL) in those patients. Objective: This study aimed to assess the QoL in children with JIA using Children Health Assessment Questionnaire (CHAQ) instrument. Materials and Methods: This is a case–control study including 52 children with JIA who were attending Basrah Center for Disables Rehabilitation/Basrah, Iraq. Other age- and gender-matched children free from any systemic connective tissue diseases were also enrolled to represent the control group. One parent of each child (cases and control) was asked to read and fill an Arabic-translated version of the original CHAQ. Data were extracted from the questionnaire and subjected for statistical analysis. Results: Four types of JIA have been recognized which were oligoarthritis, polyarticular arthritis, systemic arthritis, and enthesitis-related arthritis which represented 48.08%, 36.54%, 9.62%, and 5.77%, respectively. Analysis of CHAQ data revealed a worse life quality in patients compared to controls. Six CHAQ domains (arising, walking, hygiene, activities, disability, and pain) attained significantly higher scores in patients (0.73 ± 0.61, 0.76 ± 0.52, 0.5 ± 0.29, 1.12 ± 0.6, 0.67 ± 0.41, and 0.83 ± 0.53, respectively) than in controls (0, 0, 0, 0.32 ± 0.26, 0.24 ± 0.21, and 0, respectively). Conclusion: CHAQ is a feasible and a reliable instrument to evaluate Iraqi children with arthritis. Treated children with JIA of different types had a worse QoL compared with the unaffected children.