Relationship between Quality of Life and Depression in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the most common causes of disability in neurological diseases, especially in the age of 20-40 years. Many factors caused by the disease have a significant impact on the quality of life the MS patients. The purpose of this study was to investigate the demographic factors including age, gender, occupation, marital status, education level, duration of disease, and the type of disease. Also, it was to survey the factors caused by the disease. such as the severity of depression, disability, cognition, and pain which all can affected the quality of life.

This non-experimental and cross-sectional study was conducted on 82 cases with multiple sclerosis (53 people with relapse-recovery type and 29 people with secondary progressive type) in a simple, non-randomized manner in the age group of 25-60 years. In order to investigate the relationship between variables and the factors affecting the quality of life, Pearson and Spearman correlation tests and multiple regression tests were used, considering the alpha level to be equal to 0.05.

The results of multiple regression demonstrated that all the above factors had a high correlation with the physical and psychological conditions of the MS patients' quality of life, with a correlation coefficient of 0.89 and 0.85, respectively. Moreover, depression severity and disability level were the most important influencing factors in determining the physical condition of the MS patients' quality of life, with the standard beta coefficient of -0.48 and -0.35, respectively. The only effective factor in the psychological state of the MS patients' quality of life was the depression severity (with a standard beta coefficient of -0.67).

The severity of depression is a critical and effective factor in the quality of life of people with multiple sclerosis