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Recent viral infection in US blood donors and health-related quality of life (HRQOL)

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Abstract

Purpose

Blood donors are considered to be one of the healthiest populations, but relatively little is known about their perceived quality of life. The objective was to examine HRQOL in donors infected with HIV, HBV, HCV or HTLV and a comparison group.

Methods

Donors with confirmed viral infection (cases) and donors who tested false-positive (controls) participated in a multicenter study of US blood donors (2010–2013), funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI). HRQOL was measured by the EuroQol Five Dimension (EQ-5D) instrument and EQ-5D visual analogue scale (VAS). The lower 25th ‰ of EQ-5D index or VAS score of controls was defined as a “lower HRQOL.”

Results

A total of 1574 controls completed the HRQOL assessment with a mean EQ-5D index of 0.94 (SD = 0.10) and EQ-VAS of 87.6 (SD = 10.6). Mean EQ-5D index for 192 HIV-, 315 HCV- and 195 HTLV-positive donors were significantly lower than the controls (0.86, 0.83 and 0.87; SD = 0.18, 0.20 and 0.16, respectively, p < 0.001). HBV-positive donors (n = 290) had a similar mean EQ-5D index (0.93, SD = 0.14, p = 0.05) to controls. Anxiety/depression was reported by 34 % of cases, compared with 13 % of controls. In multivariable modeling, the odds of lower HRQOL in HIV, HBV, HCV and HTLV cases were 2.1, 1.6, 2.6 and 2.3 times that of controls, respectively (p < 0.05).

Conclusions

HRQOL reported by blood donors with recent viral infections was relatively high but lower than controls. On average, HRQOL among HCV-positive donors was the lowest and HBV-positive donors reported scores similar to donors without infection.

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Funding

This study was funded by research contract HHSN26820041717 from the Retrovirus Epidemiology Donor Study-II (REDS-II) sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Blood Systems Research Institute, 270 Masonic Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94118, USA

    Farnaz Vahidnia & Brian Custer

  2. American Red Cross, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

    Susan L. Stramer & David E. Krysztof

  3. New York Blood Center, New York, NY, USA

    Debra Kessler & Beth Shaz

  4. OneBlood, Tampa, FL, USA

    German Leparc

  5. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Simone A. Glynn

  6. University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Brian Custer

Authors
  1. Farnaz Vahidnia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Farnaz Vahidnia.

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Conflict of interest

Authors disclose no potential conflict of interest for the submitted work in the past 3 years.

Human and animal rights statement

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Fig. 1

EQ-5D-3D questions and Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) in the US Risk Factor Study Questionnaire. (DOCX 2378 kb)

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Vahidnia, F., Stramer, S.L., Kessler, D. et al. Recent viral infection in US blood donors and health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Qual Life Res 26, 349–357 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-016-1392-5

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