If it is because people with some illness tend to become concerned with their condition, then I could rephrase to: why does being concerned with health affect your quality of life? Is it because such people spend less time enjoying life and change their behavior?
Dear Roger
According in my oppinion subjective nature of quality of life has an important role and it can be more powerful than objective situation( the empact of psychology component can not be ignored). While health status is almost medical(phisical and biological) variable. so we can see some people who are not in good health status but their evaluation of the illness are not untolerable , may be they are optimistic, goal -orianted and hopeful and they have not enough time to spend to think their illness. on the other side, people who are not enough motivated in their life, are ready to become worried about every bothering things in life and illness is not excepted from, as a result their catastophe can generalize in all ereas of their life(quality of life). this differnce can be good subject for research.
The mechanisms linking health status and (health related) quality of life is according to this paper positive or negative affect:
Affect and self-rated health: A dynamic approach with older adults. Segerstrom, Suzanne C.. Health Psychology 33.7 (Jul 2014): 720-728.
Objective: Self-rated health (SRH) predicts mortality above and beyond objective health risks and, as such, comprises an important aspect of health. Established contributors to SRH include affect, age, and disease, but neither their dynamic nor their synergistic contributions to SRH have been comprehensively tested. Method: The present study employed older adults (N = 150; Mage = 75 years) and a longitudinal design with 6-month waves over a period up to 5 years. Positive (PA) and negative affect (NA), chronic disease, and SRH were assessed at each wave. Results: In multilevel models with single predictors, older age, more chronic disease, and higher NA predicted worse SRH, whereas higher PA predicted better SRH. Affect predicted SRH both between and within people. In multilevel models with interactions between affect and age or disease, individual differences in NA predicted worse SRH primarily in older people. Within people, changes in NA were associated with changes in SRH, but more so in younger than in older people. Within people, changes in PA were associated with changes in SRH, but only when health was better than usual. Conclusion: There were both dynamic and synergistic relationships between affect and SRH that could only emerge in a multilevel, multivariable design. In the case of NA, between-person, trait NA had the opposite relationship to SRH and age compared to within-person, state NA. Which component of this relationship predicts mortality is an important question for future research.
The body of literature on this is massive. There would be thousands of articles written about every aspect of this topic. The most commonly used models have multiple dimensions that cover things such as pain, mobility, activities of daily living, mental health, social connections, the ability to fulfill social and work roles, and a raft of other things. Looking up the research around the SF-36 or EQ-5D would be a good place to start to your search.
Thanks Kylie, I am pretty sure there must be thousands of articles, I have articles on the subject too. One issue is that most of such papers are speculative and exploratory in nature.
Why ill people have worse quality of life? Where is the specific empirical evidence (not theoretically)?
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