Pulmonary Disease Requiring Ambulatory Oxygen Therapy -Resilience and Quality of Life

Dyspnea is a common symptom in pulmonary disease patients, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and interstitial lung diseases. These patients often have low health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and life satisfaction (LS), and high levels of anxiety and depression.

Oxygen therapy is used in severe pulmonary diseases to improve HRQoL and prolong survival. Ambulatory oxygen therapy is prescribed to patients who become transiently hypoxemic, e.g. during exercise or normal outdoors activities. However, only 46 % of COPD patients were adherent to long-term oxygen therapy. Proper adaptation to a serious illness, such as advanced COPD and interstitial lung diseases, necessitates resilience. Resilience is an ability to adapt appropriately in difficulties in life. This ability is based on a person's psychological resources, and it can be learned and improved with time and effort. Evaluation of resilience is commonly applied in psychological examinations and research, but less attention has been paid in medical context even though resilience capacity is closely connected to recovery abilities and adaptation.

The main aim is to measure resilience in pulmonary disease patients receiving ambulatory oxygen therapy and how it correlates with other measures of HRQoL and LS. Also anxiety and depression are surveyed and satisfaction to ambulatory oxygen therapy devices and associated services.Investigators also compare the HRQoL of pulmonary disease patients receiving ambulatory oxygen therapy to an age and gender matched sample of the general population. Primary outcome measure was the proportion of patients with low resilience, and secondary outcomes were how resilience correlated with HRQoL, LS, anxiety and depression in patients prescribed ambulatory oxygen therapy.