Health-related quality of life in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

Background The relative impact of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) on health-related quality of life (HRQL) compared to other chronic liver diseases has not been fully explored. Aim To compare the domain scores of the 29-item Chronic Liver Disease Questionnaire (CLDQ) for patients with NAFLD to those with chronic hepatitis B and chronic hepatitis C. Methods A HRQL questionnaire, CLDQ, was routinely administered to patients attending a liver clinic. Additional clinical and laboratory data were obtained on patients with NAFLD, chronic hepatitis B, and chronic hepatitis C from our quality of life database. Scores for each of the six CLDQ domains were compared using one-way ANOVA and multiple regression. Results Complete data were available for 237 patients. NAFLD patients scored lowest on multiple CLDQ domains. Based on the bivariate data, NAFLD patients have the poorest HRQL, followed by chronic hepatitis C and chronic hepatitis B patients. Multivariate analysis showed that some specific domain score correlations remained significant for NAFLD diagnosis, cirrhosis, gender, and body mass index. Conclusion NAFLD patients had significantly lower quality of life scores compared with patients with hepatitis B or hepatitis C on multiple CLDQ domains, suggesting that HRQL was severely impaired in patients with NAFLD.