Quality of life and its correlates in alcohol dependent males: rehab inpatients and shelter or hostel homeless persons

Introduction: Alcohol abuse leads to a lot of mental, somatic and social problems and may also be a cause of homelessness. These problems are often correlated with a decrease in alcohol dependent persons’ quality of life including their capacity to handle everyday issues and the ability to obtain medical care. The purpose of the study was to compare the quality of life of alcohol dependent persons: rehab centre inpatients and homeless subjects, and also to evaluate correlations between their quality of life and chosen clinical variables, social support and barriers in obtaining alcohol dependence treatment.

Material and methods: The study investigated 60 inpatients treated for alcohol dependence and 29 alcohol dependent homeless persons in shelter and hostel accommodation. All subjects were assessed using the following psychometrically scales: SF-36, SADD, BDI, MMSE, STAI and an interview questionnaire.

Results: It was observed that rehab inpatients scored slightly worse results than homeless persons with regard to general mental functioning and to limitations in fulfilling life roles due to emotional problems. That is compared to homeless subjects, rehab inpatients had lower scoring of emotion subscale (E) and mental component summary (MCS) of the SF-36. It was suggested that low values of physical component summary (PCS) of SF-36 in rehab inpatients were associated with anxiety and somatic symptoms, and low values of mental component summary (MCS) with intensive anxiety symptoms, depression and other psychic problems. The observed low PCS values in homeless subject group were associated with duration of alcohol drinking, and low MCS values with better social support, intensive depression symptoms, and psychic problems.

Conclusions: Despite socio-demographic and clinical differences between studied groups, rehab inpatients and homeless subjects had similar evaluation of their quality of life in SF-36 scale scoring.