Prevalence of Lifestyle Factors and Lifestyle Diseases among Working Adult Urban Population in Hyderabad City

Preventive and social medicine

Important preventable lifestyle factors or risk factors contributing to Non Communicable Diseases (NCDs) are unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, exposure to tobacco smoke or the harmful use of alcohol. Lifestyle risk factors predict the future of Lifestyle diseases and underlie most NCDs. These lifestyle factors are increasing as diets shift to foods high in fats and sugars, while work and living situations become more sedentary. Besides, tempting marketing of alcoholic beverages and tobacco products have also increased risk factors exposure, cumulating in an increased future diseases burden. Lifestyle diseases are becoming major health problems in India, especially working urban population who are supposedly more prone to lifestyle factors due to nature of working environment. Lifestyle diseases are a major risk in Telangana & Andhra Pradesh, and experts say that the major threats in the two states are cancer, cardio-vascular diseases (CVD), diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases, which account 80 per cent of all known NCD cases and lead to loss of productivity in terms of debilitating the young working population. The research was carried to assess knowledge of urban working population about lifestyle diseases and their risk factors and to find distribution of lifestyle risk factors among urban population of Hyderabad city. Study type was Cross-sectional, Descriptive &Exploratory study, Duration of the Study was 3 Months (5th Feb. 2018 TO 5th May 2018), Study Area was Urban areas of Hyderabad city with Special Reference to professionals working in service sector. A pretested Structured self-administered questionnaire was asked from 348 respondents, from both male and female population in Hyderabad city. Data regarding socio-demographic profile, history of tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption, regular physical activity, junk foods and history of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases, Lower backache, Asthma/COPD and stroke was collected. Height and weight was measured using the standard techniques. BMI was calculated and classified according to WHO classification. The data was entered in MS Excel spreadsheet and analyzed using mean and proportion. Chi-square test was used as test of significance with the help of advanced excel. The p-value of <0.05 was considered as significant. The result of the study was that among the study participants 140 out of 348 had knowledge about lifestyle factors and lifestyle diseases. Among the study subjects 85 subjects had one or more type of lifestyle diseases making the prevalence of 24.42 percent. Lower back pain was the most common ailment with 10.8 percent of population suffering from the same followed by Hypertension (9.48%), Diabetes (6.03%) and Asthma/COPD (1.7%). Only two out of total study population gave history of stroke. There was a significant association between lifestyle factors like tobacco and cigarette consumption, alcohol consumption, consumption of junk food and overweight and obesity with presence of lifestyle diseases.

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