Impairment of quality of life in parents of children and adolescents with pervasive developmental disorder

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Impairment of quality of life in parents of children and adolescents with pervasive developmental disorder Diego Mugno*, Liliana Ruta, Valentina Genitori D'Arrigo and Luigi Mazzone Address: Division of Child Neurology and Psychiatry, Department of Pediatrics, University of Catania, Via S. Sofia 78, 95100 Catania, Italy Email: Diego Mugno* - [email protected]; Liliana Ruta - [email protected]; Valentina Genitori D'Arrigo - [email protected]; Luigi Mazzone - [email protected] * Corresponding author

Published: 27 April 2007 Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 2007, 5:22

doi:10.1186/1477-7525-5-22

Received: 17 October 2006 Accepted: 27 April 2007

This article is available from: http://www.hqlo.com/content/5/1/22 © 2007 Mugno et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract Background: Little is known about the Quality of Life (QOL) in parents of children with developmental diseases as compared to other severe neurological or psychiatric disorders. Aims of the present study were: to evaluate QOL in parents of children affected by Pervasive Development Disorder (PDDs), Cerebral Palsy (CP) or Mental Retardation (MR) as compared to a control group (CG); to evaluate QOL of parents of patients with different types of PDDs, namely Autistic Disorder (AD), High Function Autism/Asperger Syndromes (HFA/AS) and Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PPD-NOS); and to compare the level of impairment in QOL of mothers and fathers within PDDs, CP, MR groups and between AD, HFA/ AS, PDD-NOS sub-groups. Methods: The sample consisted of 212 parents (115 mothers and 97 fathers) of 135 children or adolescents affected by PDDs, MR or CP. An additional sample of 77 parents (42 mothers and 35 fathers) of 48 healthy children was also included and used as a control group. QOL was assessed by the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire. Results: Compared with parents of healthy children, parents in the PDDs group reported impairment in physical activity (p = 0.0001) and social relationships (p = 0.0001) and worse overall perception of their QOL (p = 0.0001) and health (p = 0.005). Scores in the physical (p = 0.0001), psychological (p = 0.0001) and social relationships domains (p = 0.0001) and in the physical (p = 0.0001) and social relationships (p = 0.0001) domains were lower compared to the MR group CP group respectively. Little differences were observed between MR, CP and control groups. The level of impairment of physical (p = 0.001) and psychological (p = 0.03) well-being were higher in mothers than in fathers in the PDDs and CP groups respectively; in the other groups, and across all the other domains of QQL impairment was similar. There were no statistically significant differences in the scores between t