Individualised and health-related quality of life of persons with spinal cord injury.

STUDY DESIGN: Cross sectional.

OBJECTIVES: To examine associations among functional status, health-related and individualised quality of life (QoL) and coping style in subjects with spinal cord injury (SCI).

SETTING: Italy.

METHODS: Forty subjects attending our hospital-based rehabilitation centre for SCI were administered the Spinal Cord Independence Measure-version III (SCIM-III), the Short Form-36 (SF-36), the Schedule for the Evaluation of Individual QoL-Direct Weighting (SEIQoL-DW) and the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situation (CISS) to assess functional status, health-related QoL, individualised QoL and coping strategies, respectively.

RESULTS: The SCIM-III scores were positively correlated (P<0.01) with the physical functioning subscale of the SF-36. The only scale that correlated (P<0.01) with the SEIQoL-DW scores was the SF-36 mental health subscale. Positive correlations among task-oriented or avoidance-oriented coping and specific measures of health-related QoL emerged.

CONCLUSIONS: Data from the present study showed only a few associations among different measures of QoL and suggest that patient-centered evaluations of QoL are not necessarily or strictly related to functional status or health-related QoL. Coping strategies seem to be significantly related to the subjects perceptions of QoL, but mostly in the health-related domains.