Health-related quality of life and treatment satisfaction in Palestinians with rheumatoid arthritis: a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: Studying health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and treatment satisfaction have helped in understanding how to optimize rheumatoid arthritis (RA) treatment outcomes and find ways to alleviate signs and symptoms among patients. OBJECTIVE: In this study, our objective was to evaluate the association between satisfaction with care and HRQoL among RA patients from northern Palestine. In addition, this study also aimed to determine the associations between the clinical characteristics of patients with RA with treatment satisfaction and HRQoL. METHODS: This was a multicenter cross-sectional study conducted between July and October 2018. Patients with RA diagnosis who presented at rheumatology clinics were interviewed. The SF-36 short questionnaire was used to assess HRQoL and Treatment Satisfaction Questionnaire for Medication (TSQM) version 1.4 to assess treatment satisfaction among study groups. We use descriptive and comparative statistics to present the results. RESULTS: A total of 283 patients were included. Several sociodemographic and clinical characteristics were found to be associated with poor HRQoL scores and low treatment satisfaction. The physical component summary (PCS) was negatively associated with age, patients’ self-reported disease activity, duration of the disease, and the total number of medications taken by the patient, and was positively associated with educational background, employment, and household income. The mental component summary (MCS) was negatively associated with patients’ self-reported disease activity and the patient's total number of comorbid diseases. The number of comorbid diseases was negatively associated with effectiveness. All HRQoL subscales were significantly correlated with treatment satisfaction. The range of correlation with PCS was between 0.272 for convenience and 0.425 for side effects (p < 0.001). Similarly, the highest correlation with MCS was 0.458 for side effects, and the lowest was 0.337 for convenience (p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The current study found that HRQoL was significantly correlated with treatment satisfaction. Furthermore, the results of this study showed that HRQoL and treatment satisfaction are likely to be affected by sociodemographic and clinical characteristics. These results may be beneficial in clinical practice, mainly in the early treatment of patients with RA, at a stage where it is still possible to increase treatment satisfaction. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41927-022-00251-5.