RESEARCH ARTICLE
Patient and Spouse Perceived Quality of Life Five Years After Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery
G.A. Lee*, 1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 63
Last Page: 67
Publisher ID: TONURSJ-2-63
DOI: 10.2174/1874434600802010063
PMID: 19319222
PMCID: PMC2582829
Article History:
Received Date: 28/3/2008Revision Received Date: 16/8/2008
Acceptance Date: 2/9/2008
Electronic publication date: 9/10/2008
Collection year: 2008

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) was examined in patients’ and their respective spouses’ perspectives five years after cardiac bypass surgery. Participants completed the Short-Form 36 (SF-36) which consists of eight domains and two component summary scores measuring physical and mental HRQoL (PCS and MCS respectively). Paired t tests were used to compare couples responses (n=56 pairs) with spouses recording higher (i.e. better scores) in the physical-related domains although differences were not significant. Statistically significant results were found between patients and spouses in emotional role, mental health, social functioning, energy/vitality and general health perceptions (p< 0.001). The PCS were very similar for both the patient and spouses sample (45.9 v. 45.8 respectively, p = .829) and the MCS was significantly higher in the patients compared to the spouses (54.8 v. 47.7, p < .001). The results demonstrated that spouses could accurately report the physical aspects of HRQoL but not the mental health of their partner.