The quality of life of women volunteering as live-related kidney donors in India.
BACKGROUND
Women outnumber men 6:1 as live-related donors in our renal transplant programme. Women donors in developing regions are often illiterate and unemployed. This study was done to assess the change in quality of life of women who donate kidneys.


METHODS
We prospectively studied 73 consecutive women volunteering as live-related kidney donors over a 6-month period using the World Health Organization Quality of Life Brief (WHO QoL Bref) Questionnaire and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Each woman was interviewed 2 weeks before and 6 months after kidney donation.


RESULTS
There was a significant improvement in all the domains, namely physical (p=0.0001), psychological (p<0.0001), social relationship (p=0.037) and environment (p<0.0001) of the WHO QoL Bref questionnaire. Donors who were mothers had a greater improvement in all 4 domains than donors with other relationships. There was a significant decrease in the depression score (p<0.0001), but no change in the anxiety scores (p=0.065) following kidney donation. All donors would donate again, if possible.


CONCLUSIONS
In live-related women kidney donors, quality of life improves and depression scores decline after kidney donation.
Department of Surgical Disciplines, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India. sandeepguleria@hotmail.com
S
S
Guleria
V S K
VS
Reddy
G S
GS
Bora
R
R
Sagar
D
D
Bhowmik
S
S
Mahajan
D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000175:diagnosis; D003863:Depression / Q000175:diagnosis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D016030:Kidney Transplantation; D019520:Living Donors / Q000523:psychology*; D011446:Prospective Studies; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D011788:Quality of Life; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric