Empirical Literature
Anxiety directly relates to quality of life. In a qualitative, descriptive research study, Lucio and colleagues (2013) aim to understand the mother’s perspective on caring for their child with muscular dystrophy. Convenience sampling was used to select children with muscular dystrophy from a public hospital, and the nurses then made contact with their mothers. The open- ended interviews revealed important information about the quality of life while caring for a child with muscular dystrophy. Mothers considered caring for their child to be a difficult task, since they deal with unknown devices that their child has become dependent on. This leads to a chronic fear of losing their child and fear of what happens when the electricity goes out. All this fear causes anxiety, which the researchers found to directly affect the quality of life of the mother as well as child. Quality of life can be greatly negated while caring for a child with muscular dystrophy. Mothers often leave their chores, change their daily routine, and postpone their commitments in order to stay with their child who is dependent on their care. Not only are these children care-dependent, a lot of them also rely on mechanical equipment to live. Much of the anxiety experienced in these mothers roots from “being afraid with the possibility of them not surviving, due to the malfunction of the equipment,” (Lucio et al., 2013, p. 86). Besides the fear of death, anxiety is highlighted as a factor that directly afflicts with quality of life of both the children and mothers (Lucio et al., 2013).
