Introduction: Bronchiectasis is a chronic suppurative lung disease having greater inverse impact on the patient’s quality of life. The BSI score is a multidimensional grading system capable of classifying the severity of bronchiectasis according to its prognosis. The St. George Respiratory Questionnaire is a self-administered health-related quality of life questionnaire containing 50 items and 76 weighted responses measuring the quality of life of the patients with respiratory morbidity in three dimensional components namely Symptoms, Activity, and Impacts.

Objectives: To compare the severity of bronchiectasis as measured by BSI score with the QOL measured by SGRQ scores.

Materials and Methods: The prospective observational study was conducted among 82 patients attending to the Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences, with stable bronchiectasis during the period October 2016 to April 2018. A proforma was used to collect the socio-demographic and clinical variables including age, gender, severity of dyspnoea, history of smoking and number of exacerbations per year. The patient was then subjected to routine laboratory investigations, spirometry, HRCT and sputum culture. BSI score for severity and SGRQ score for QOL were computed for each patient and correlated.

Results: Majority of the study participants belonged to the 50 -69 years age group (56.1%) and female participants (57.3%) compared to the males (46.3%). The mean BSI scores obtained by the study participants (n=82) was 10.63 ± 4.26 respectively. Most of the study participants (68.3%) were classified as severe bronchiectasis than mild and moderate categories as 8.5% and 23.2% respectively. There was a highly significant correlation between the BSI score and the SGRQ score percentage.

Conclusion: The study showed that as the severity scores increased there was a derangement in the quality of life as recorded by the SGRQ.

Keywords: Bronchiectasis severity Index, BSI, St. George Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ), Bronchiectasis.

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Varughese Prince

Assistant Professor, Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences, Pondicherry