Health related Quality of Life with HIV/AIDS in different stages of HIV infection.

Disease stages of HIV infection is one of the important predictor of Health related Quality of Life (HQoL) of the people living with HIV/AIDS. This cross sectional study was an attempt to compare the HQoL of HIV-infected patients across the three CDC stages of HIV-infection namely, asymptomatic, symptomatic, and AIDS-related conditions. A total of 82 patients, 28 in asymptomatic, 26 in symptomatic, and 28 in AIDS-related conditions, from three NGOs and one Infectious Disease Hospital (IDH) were interviewed using interviewer administered semi structured questionnaire developed by adopting "World Health Organization Quality of Life HIV BREF (WHOQOL-HIV BREF) instrument". Analysis revealed that AIDS-related conditions and symptomatic patients were experiencing significantly poorer quality of life than asymptomatic patients in the domain of physical (F=7.006, p <0.005), level of independence) F=6.552, p<0.005(, overall perception of health related quality of life (F=3.634, p<0.05) and overall general health perception (F=7.842, p<0.001).