Does Quality of Life in Survivors of Surgery for Acute Left-Sided Infective Endocarditis Differ from Non-Endocarditis Patients?

Figures

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  Figure 1. SF-36 subcomponents mean scores and 95% CI for patients subjected to surgery for infective endocarditis (IE, green) compared to patients subjected to cardiac surgery for non-IE purposes (control, blue). Note the overlapping between intervals for each subcomponent, indicating no differences. Abbreviations: PF, physical functioning; RP, role physical; BP, bodily pain; GH, general health; VT, vitality; SF, social functioning; RE, role emotional; MH, mental health.

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  Figure 2. Component summaries for IE patients (blue) and non-IE patients (control, orange). The analysis was performed using relative weights as described by Alonso et al. [18]. The median PCS values tended to be lower than the MCS values.

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  Figure 3. PCA representing the distribution of the cases for the endocarditis group (red dots) and the control group (blue dots). The x-axis represents PCOMP_1, and the y-axis represents PCOMP_2. PCOMP_1 represents the overall quality of life. Hence, patients who perform better on quality of life and have high scores in the SF-36 questionnaire will have higher values of PCOM_1 and will be located on the right end of the Figure. The positive values of P_COMP2 represent a predominant better scoring on physical subcomponents rather than on mental subcomponents. On the other hand, patients who perform better on the mental subcomponents will be located on the lower end of the Figure. Those patients with similar performance in mental and physical subcomponents will be found in the center of the figure. A similar distribution of the dots between the groups is shown, with most dots localized in the right middle part of the distribution, reflecting a better overall quality of life, with a balanced distribution in scoring between mental and physical subcomponents.