O impacto da insegurança alimentar na redução da qualidade de vida: um estudo longitudinal no interior do semiárido nordestino

Abstract

In the context of Food and Nutritional Security, when the right to adequate access to food is not guaranteed, this population can suffer from Food Insecurity (FI), a complex, multi-causal phenomenon that represents a health problem worldwide. Researchers has been dedicating to studying the relationship between FI and Quality of Life (QL), whose results show that the violation of this access to adequate food can cause alarming consequences in people's lives, such as mental health, social disorders, health damage physical and other health problems, affecting subjects in all life cycles. Thus, this study aims to analyze the association between FI and QL of residents of the city of Cuité/PB, from a longitudinal study carried out in 2014 and 2019. The sample of this study consisted of 225 people, residents both in urban and rural areas and the instruments used were the Brazilian Scale of Food Insecurity (BSFI) and the WHOQOL-bref. An exploratory analysis was performed based on central measures and data dispersion, of the bivariate type, considering sociodemographic characteristics and mean QL scores, and of the multivariate type from linear longitudinal regression models for fixed effects, and it was from this that predicted values of quality of life outcomes were generated according to family AI levels. It was noticed that, in both years studied, the QL domain with the lowest score was environment and the highest score was social relations. It is noteworthy that there was a significant reduction in the mean score in the Physical domain between baseline and follow-up (-2.9) and stagnation in the other mean scores in the social relations, psychological and environment domains. Based on the statistical analysis for panel data, there was an inverse association between the scores of the Psychological and Environment domains and Severe AI, that is, in situations of severe AI, there was a reduction in the QL scores of these domains by - 11.222 points and -7.987 points, respectively. In this sense, it was noted that in the Psychological domain, the predicted mean scores are similar for the categories of Food Security (FS), Mild and Moderate Food Insecurity, significantly reducing the situation of severe FI. In the case of the environment domain, the predicted mean scores decrease in the moderate and severe FI category, when compared to the scores in the FS and mild FI. Finally, in the Physical and Social Relations domains, this effect of FI in reducing the score was not observed. The results presented in this cohort confirm the hypothesis that the FI phenomenon negatively impacts QL outcomes over time.