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Social Support and Quality of Life in HIV infection

The phenomenon of social support is one of the issues that attracts plenty of attention from researchers of the health sciences (Cobb, 1976). This interest arose for reasons of empirical nature that derived from data pointing to its usefulness for the maintenance of health and improvement of disease. Specifically, social support is nominated as a relevant variable to the prevention of psychopathology (Caplan, 1974). In other words, it has been argued that, when dealing with stressful life conditions, people who have social support are in better condition than those without it. So, it could be said that people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) with low social support have a poorer quality of life related to health than those with normal social support.

A vast literature argues that high levels of social support provide protection against disease progression. In a study with 103 gay and bisexual men HIV positive, it found evidence that subjects with low levels of social support have more physical symptoms, more hopelessness and depression than those with a high level of social support (Zich & Temoshok, 1987). Similarly, in another study, it is observed that the reduced availability of perceived social support is associated with greater use of avoidance coping strategies and major mood disorders, including higher levels of depression and self-reported anxiety and lower levels of force among positive men for HIV (Wolf, et al., 1991).

Kaplan, Patterson, Kerner, & Grant (1999), develop a study from a different perspective, trying to untangle cause and effect, so they proposed an alternative explanation in that low social support is a consequence rather than a cause of poor health status. They find that the size of the social network decreases as the subjects are progressively sicker. In addition, the data indicate that the progression of the disease precedes more above the decline in the social network and that in reality, the instrumental social support enhances with the progress of the infection. (Kaplan, Patterson, Kerner, & Grant, 1999)

In other words, as the disease progresses, the people HIV positive can have very few people in their social network; however, with those who remain in the network can be counted on more than with those who got lost.

Considering these results, it is clear that social support and health related illness should not always be conceptualized and investigated as a predictor of health outcomes, once changes in social support may also be a consequence of the disease. Further, the influences can be reciprocal, in other words, bidirectional. A cross-sectional study reported similar results in the sense that the perception of support received from the couple and the family increases as the disease progresses measured by the stages of classification of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Remor, Eduardo, 2001). The social support is an important variable in understanding of the well-being and quality of life of people with HIV infection. Address efforts for the development of this personal resource contributes directly to an improvement of the quality of life of these patients (Remor, 2002)

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