In the meantime, people are less active physically nowadays than they used to be, due to changes in the nature of working and life styles, resulting in more non-communicable chronically diseases (NCD).
Since 1990, there has been a substantial epidemiological shift away from communicable diseases in children to more non-communicable diseases in adults. 1 A relatively small number of modifiable behavioural risk factors, including tobacco smoking, excessive drinking, physical inactivity, unhealthy diet and alcohol use, are major contributors to the development of adult chronic diseases.
This paper on cause-specific mortality is mainly descriptive work in which we expect more non-communicable diseases (NCDs), that is, diseases that cannot be passed from person to person as adult causes of death in formal neighborhoods compared to the informal ones.
One possible explanation for this can be communicable and infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS have got more attention as compared with non communicable diseases like cancer.
Findings from a study using data from a nationally representative sample survey (World Health Survey 2003) conducted in Ghana revealed that about 18% of the respondents had been diagnosed with one or more chronic non-communicable disease(s) with 45% of them currently receiving treatment (Tagoe, Household burden of chronic disease in Ghana, Unpublished).
Hypertension is also a major non communicable disease in Malaysia.
Hypertension is a common non communicable condition worldwide.
Health policy is focusing more and more on chronic non-communicable diseases.
It identifies problems such as: ■ Sharply rising demand as more children contract non-communicable diseases such as asthma and obesity.
Current responses in Lebanon and Jordan struggle to engage with the more prevalent, chronic, non-communicable health needs of refugees and asylum seekers from Syria.
Individuals of middle and lower income, occupation class and/or educational level are more likely to develop non-communicable diseases and are more exposed to related risk factors [ 1- 3, 5, 6, 9].
