Women’s Health
Multimorbidity Burden, Physical Health Perception and Self-Efficacy Kristyne D Mansilla Dubon* Kristyne Mansilla Dubon Edward Peters
Multimorbidity is the presence of ≥2 chronic conditions in an individual and is increasingly common with the growing burden of chronic diseases. Multimorbidity is associated with premature death, poor quality of life, and declined physical function. We aimed to describe the overall multimorbidity burden and to examine the relationship between multimorbidity and self-rated physical health as well as the relationship between multimorbidity and self-efficacy. In this cross-sectional study, we used data from the prospective cohort of women, The Women and Their Children’s Health (WaTCH) conducted in southeast Louisiana from 2012-2014. We constructed our measure of multimorbidity by counting all chronic diseases participants reported. We captured self-rated physical health with a single item that asked individuals to rank their health as poor, fair, good, very good, or excellent. Each response had a score of 1-5, with the highest score indicating poor health. To measure self-efficacy, we used the 10-item General Self-Efficacy Scale, the total score ranges between 10-40, with a higher score indicating a greater sense of self-efficacy. We conducted descriptive analyses to describe overall multimorbidity and Poisson regression models to evaluate the relationship between multimorbidity, self-rated physical health and self-efficacy. We observed that of 2369 women who reported a chronic condition, 1502 (62%) had at least 2 chronic conditions. The mean number of chronic conditions per participant was 1.87 (SD: ±1.5) with a range of 0-15. The mean multimorbidity count was 2.95 (SD: ±1.3) with a range of 2-9. The most common condition found in women with multimorbidity was obesity (n=825, 59%). After adjusting for confounders, we observed positive associations between multimorbidity and self-rated health. (RR:1.1 95% CI:1.073-1.12), as the multimorbidity count increased, the self-rated physical health score increased. We also found that multimorbidity and self-efficacy had positive associations, (RR:1.1 95% CI:1.073-1.12), as the multimorbidity count increased, the self-efficacy score increased. In our study, we found that more than half of the women who reported a chronic illness had at least 2 chronic conditions. We observed that multimorbidity may affect the perception of health and, in contrast, may improve the sense of self-efficacy.