Statistical analysis
meningitis, CABM, hearing impairment, headache, disability
MENINGITIS, REGRESSION, HEARING IMPAIRMENT
Baseline and outcome characteristics were described. Categorical variables were summarized as counts (percentages). Continuous variables were expressed as medians with interquartile ranges (IQR), mean with standard deviation and minimum and maximum to describe QOL’s domains scores. We checked the internal consistency of each domain of the WHOQOL-BREF by calculating Cronbach’s alpha.We investigated factors associated with QOL among the following variables: patient’s background characteristics, initial clinical presentation, CABM impairments at 12 months from meningitis onset: disability scores (GOS), hearing impairment and headache. In a first step, bivariate analyses were performed between our outcome variables and independent variables using parametric (ANOVA, Student’s t-test and Pearson’s correlation coefficient) or non-parametric equivalent tests if appropriate. We selected variables associated with outcome variables at a threshold of 20% (p<0.20) for multivariate analysis, we also included in final regression analysis potential confounding variables (mainly sociodemographic variables). To analyze the relationship of sociodemographic factors, medical data (medical background and CABM clinical course) and CABM impairments at 12 months (GOS, headache, hearing impairment) on the four WHOQOL-Bref domains, hierarchical multivariate linear regression analyses were performed. We chose to use the linear score, but we could have used a threshold as used in some works. However, to our knowledge, there is no validated threshold for identifying people with impaired QOL when using the WHOQOL scale. For each independent variable of the model, unstandardized coefficients with their associated p-value were presented. Determination coefficients (R²) showing the explained difference in variance of QOL’s domains explained by each group of associated variables was presented, as well as statistical significance of the RAnalyses were performed by using RStudio 1.2.5033 software [