Nutritional Status, Food Habit and Health-RelatedQuality of Life among People Living with Hiv/Aids(Plwha) “Attending” Federal Medical Centre, Abeokuta

Abstract

The study assessed the nutritional status, food habits and health related quality of life amongpeople living with HIV/AIDS attending Federal Medical Centre, Abeokuta. The study wasdescriptive cross-sectional survey in design involving 168 patients randomly selected from thehospital. A semi-structured questionnaire was utilised to get the socio-demographic informationand food habit of the respondents. Nutritional status was determined using BMI and was calculatedwhile results were classified using WHO standard. Data analysis was carried out using Statisticalpackage for social sciences (SPSS v.20.0). Result shows that Meal skipping was common among38.7% of the respondents and this was attributed to their busy schedule (18.5%). About 48.2% ofthe respondents had normal nutritional status, while 25.5%, 19.6% and 6.5% were under-weight,over-weight and obese respectively. Also, 63.3% of the respondents had poor quality of life in thegeneral quality of life domain, 50% had good quality of life in the Physical and psychologicalhealth domain respectively. Moreso, 54.8% had good quality of life in level of independencedomain, while 51.8%, 63.1% and 68.5% had poor quality of life in social relationship domain,environmental and spiritual domains respectively. Effort should be made to increase social supportand enhance the implementation of supporting policy in order to improve the quality of life ofpeople living with HIV/AIDS. Key words: Nutritional status, Quality of life, food habit, people living with HIV