The Impact of Behavioral Factors on Health-related Quality of Life in Adult Patients with Asthma

Abstract

Background: Smoking in asthma can increase the swelling of these bronchial tubes, leading to more difficulty of breathing and making asthma symptoms worse. The concept of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is known as the person's knowledge and understanding of experiences and situations that this person has been through in their life, especially in health conditions. Aim: Asthma is a chronic disease affecting the lungs, leading to many respiratory issues, causing a great impact on health-related quality of life in adult patients, including activity limitation, physical and mental health problems. Also, there are different associated types of factors can worsen the condition of asthma. One of the most important types of these factors are behavioral factors, including smoking, alcohol use, and exercise. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate that impact of these behavioral factors on health-related quality of life. Methodology: This study used an open source data from Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in the United States. It is a health survey using the telephone in order to collect data from the United States residents. To accomplish the aim of this study, Statistical Analysis System (9.4 version) was employed for different descriptive, inferential, and predictive analysis methods. Results: BRFSS 2014 data consists of 461,436 patients; 42,875 of these patients are current adult patients of asthma. 32,531 of adult patients with asthma are smokers, 13,238 are alcohol users, and 26,847are exercisers. All p-values of different analyses showed a statistically significant association between each behavioral factor and indicators of health-related quality of life. Conclusions: The findings of this study demonstrate that adult patients with asthma who have these behavioral factors are at higher risk of having poor health-related quality of life than adult patients with asthma, who do not have these behavioural factors.