Quality of life of people seeking for acupuncture treatment

Background The use of Acupuncture, part of Chinese Medicine, has grown as well as the need to understand its effects. The Quality of Life (QOL) assessment is an important way to have a global view of the patient. Objective To assess the QoL of people who seek acupuncture at the outpatient clinic of an acupuncture school. Methods QOL assessment using WHOQOL-BREF applied only once to people who voluntarily sought for acupuncture at the general outpatient clinic of Faculdade EBRAMEC in 2016. Results People who sought for acupuncture treatment presented lower mean QoL value in all domains compared to normative values for Brazil, with physical domain presenting lower values than the other domains. It was also observed that male patients had higher values in the physical, psychological domains and general QOL compared to women. Conclusion Our data demonstrated that people seeking for acupuncture treatment presented lower values of QOL in comparison to a referential study with a Brazilian population, providing for the first time reference values measured by WHOQOL-bref, for patients seeking for acupuncture in the city of São Paulo.


71
This study was carried out through an observational, descriptive, transversal research with a quantitative 72 approach, through WHOQOL-BREF instrument data evaluation after being applied to those who voluntarily 73 sought for acupuncture treatment at the general outpatient clinic of the EBRAMEC College (Brazilian School of 74 Chinese Medicine) and answered the instrument in a single moment -directly before the first appointment, during 75 2016. 76 WHOQOL-BREF [24], the selected instrument for this study, contains 4 domains and 26 questions, separated 77 into physical, psychological, social, environmental, which application presented satisfactory psychometric 78 properties of internal consistency, discriminant validity, criterion validity, concurrent validity and test-retest 79 reliability. 80 Data

101
The results were presented as mean and standard deviation for the continuous variables and, frequency and 102 proportion for categorical variables. Statistical analysis was performed using the SPSS 22.0 software. 103 For the proofing of existence of dependency relationships between categorical variables, the chi-square test 104 was used. The t-Student or Mann-Whitney tests were used to compare continuous variables between two 105 independent groups, as in the case of comparisons between males and females. 106 Wilcoxon test was used for paired variables, such as the comparison between results in pairs of 107 WHOQOL-BREF domains. Kruskal-Wallis test was used to compare three or more independent groups, such as in 108 different age groups and, in the presence of significant differences, Bonferroni correction or procedure was used. 109 Spearman test was used to verify the correlation between the variables related to the results of each of the 110 domains of the questionnaire. All variables were tested to find out whether they had a normal distribution by 111 Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, in order to decide which of the tests described above would be used. In the present 112 study, a level of statistical significance of less than or equal to 5% was adopted.

114
During the period of study, a total of 353 patients who sought treatment by acupuncture at the general 115 outpatient clinic of Faculdade EBRAMEC were analyzed, including 111 (31.4%) male and 242 (68.6%) female. The 116 proportion of female patients was higher than that of male patients (chi-square adherence test with p <0.001). 117 Among the 353 patients, the mean age was 52.9 (± 17.8) with a very wide age variation with a minimum of 7 118 and a maximum of 90 years of age, as shown in Table 1

129
The results of each WHOQOL-BREF domain and the general Quality of Life in relation to male and female 130 patients are shown in Table 3. Higher values were observed in males for physical and psychological domains and 131 quality of life compared to female patients. 132 133 All relationships between the domains showed positive correlations, indicating that patients with higher 144 values in one of the domains also present higher values in the other domains and in the Quality of Life (Table 4). 145

175
For comparison with an elderly population, it was used data from patients over 60 years old from the Porto 176 Alegre region. 130 (36.83% of the total patients) were selected from the Acupuncture group, adjusting the analysis 177 by age group. It was possible to observe that in all domains, the mean values of individuals who sought care for 178 Acupuncture were lower than the means of individuals in the Porto Alegre region [28] (Table 6). 179 180