Today, research on quality of life and health status are
quantified by standard instruments in difficult domains
of human life. It is assumed that caring for people with
chronic spinal cord injury may affect the primary caregivers`
health and this point should be greatly considered
as long as the injury exists and the caregiver
provides care [16,17].
In agreement with the finding of Rahimi-Movaghar
et al. who found a high burden for SCI, we assumed a
lower quality of life among the caregivers of SCI individuals
due to the high work load. The results of our study
confirmed this hypothesis by demonstrating lower SF-36
scores among caregiver wives comparing to normal Iranian
women. This finding also has been confirmed by
other researchers [1,9,12,18,19].
Naturally, when the people become older they will experience
a decline in their physical function [8]. Likewise,
we found that with the increase of the caregivers’ age there
was a reduction in the physical component (PF) of the
quality of life [10]. However, when the level of education
of the participants increased, it resulted a rise in the level
of the quality of life (better PF and VT). We had also
expected that a higher education and better knowledge of
different life circumstances would bring about a better life
situation for them. Conversely, other factors such as having
more children, being employed, and a longer duration
of caregiving, all of which intensifies the caregiver’s work
load and burden, can be a contributing factor of lower
physical function and quality of life.