HLTHSC1005 Principles Of Human Health And Disease
Question:
Task Description
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease, are collectively responsible for almost 70% of all deaths worldwide. Almost three quarters of all NCD deaths, and 82% of the 16 million people who died prematurely, or before reaching 70 years of age, occur in low- and middle-income countries. The rise of NCDs has been driven by primarily four major risk factors: tobacco use, physical inactivity, the harmful use of alcohol and unhealthy diets .Furthermore, as many people are affected by mental health and neurological disorders including depression, anxiety disorder, bipolar, schizophrenia and dementia as NCD’s (WHO 2018) http://www.who.int/ncds/en/
Goal
The goal of this assignment is for students to choose a topic of interest from the list below. Students are required to select one of the following topics.
• Diabetes Type 2 (including obesity)
Conduct library research and to acquire knowledge and understanding about their chosen topic. In a written essay format, Students are required to:
• Clearly state your chosen topic. Discuss the incidence and prevalence (epidemiology) of reported cases globally, including the current estimated morbidity and mortality rates of the condition.
• Discuss the cohort most at risk of the condition (the age of the population mostly affected).
• Review the current strategies for health promotion of the chosen topic and discuss the effectiveness of the programs. Do the programs appear to be working? Consider if the programs are suitable to the cohort most at risk.
Your research should primarily come from the World Health Organisation database.
Answer:
Type 2 diabetes and obesity around the world
Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease in which a body becomes resistant to the normal effects of insulin and enough insulin is not produced in the pancreas or the cells do not respond to the production of insulin (Chatterjee, Khunti & Davies, 2017).The main factors that enhance the chance of the type 2 diabetes are sedentary life style, stress, environmental factors, genetic factors and overweight or obesity. Obesity has been found to be having the largest influence over diabetes. Obesity makes the management of diabetes by increasing the resistance of the insulin in the body and the glucose tolerance that decreases the effectiveness of the drugs used for T2D (Neeland et al., 2012,pp. 1150-1159). Higher waist circumference and higher body mass index has been found to be associated with the increased type 2 diabetes. This paper would describe the epidemiology of the type e diabetes and obesity across the nation, the group of population that is directly affected by these clinical conditions, The strategies taken up by WHO and their effectiveness is dealing with this rising prevalence.
Epidemiology
Type 2 diabetes mostly develops in adults over the age of 45 years but also occurs in younger groups including the adolescents, children and the younger adults. According to the reports as many as 90 % of the obese people suffer from diabetes (Bhupathiraju & Hu, 2016, pp.1723–1735). Globally an estimation of 422 million of adults are suffering from diabetes in the year 2014, compared to 108 million in the year 1980. The prevalence of diabetes has nearly doubled since the year 1980 rising from 4.7 % to 8.5% within the adult population. This is also exacerbated by the risk factors like obesity or overweight (World Health Organization. ,2016). 1.5 million Of deaths has been reported due to chronic diabetes in the year 2012. When the trends of the prevalence of diabetes were considered diabetes has been found to be increased among the individuals those who are obese. 43% of deaths has been observed in people over 70 years and an additional 2.2 million of deaths has been attributed by cardiovascular diseases due to diabetes. Significant racial and ethnic disparities has been noticed in the prevalence of T2D. It has been found that the non-Hispanic blacks and the Mexican Americans have the higher risks of developing T2D, which can be due to the alteration in the food environment, the agricultural policies and physical activities (Bhupathiraju & Hu, 2016, pp. 2239-2251).
Graph: Trends in prevalence of diabetes, 1980–2014, by WHO region (World Health Organization., 2016)
Graph: Prevalence of being overweight, (World Health Organization. 2016)
Health promotion strategies and their effectiveness or failure
The WHO Global NCD Action Plan 2013–2020, have set out policies for mitigating the modifiable NCD risk factors (World Health Organization., 2016). The WHO global action plan had the had the following targets- such as the 25% reduction in the mortality from the cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease and diabetes, a 40 % increase in the prevalence of physical activity and an 80 % availability of the basic medicines or the equipment required to reduce T2D and obesity. The strategies mentioned in these policies needs to be scaled up for achieving the global voluntary target for halting the rising trends of the diabetes and obesity among the older adults (World Health Organization., 2016). Country Capacity Survey has been found to be varying largely by country level income and region. Most of the nations have their specific national policies to mitigate the growing prevalence of the diabetes. But in most of the developing countries, guidelines and the policies taken by the government lacks proper funding and dedicated implementation.
WHO has taken up WHO diabetes program for preventing diabetes and to minimize the complications (World Health Organization., 2016). The goal of the WHO program was to improve the health by stimulating and supporting the adoption of the measures for the surveillance and the control of diabetes in the lower middle income nations.
Although nationwide efforts have been taken to prevent diabetes and obesity, most of the guidelines have been found to be ineffective in preventing the prevalence of diabetes. This is due to the fact that in most of the cases the common people are not aware of the already set guidelines. Management of the diabetes require community based interventions. One of the greatest failure of the WHO policy and the strategies are the improper access to the medications (World Health Organization., 2016). Although insulin has been considered as the essential medicine in the model list of essential medicine of WHO, access of insulin in the rural clinical settings with poor resources has been a major problem. For example, the republic of Moldova, that has the highest prevalence of T2D have tried to address the issues within the broader health systems strengthening. Furthermore the markups throughout import tariffs, taxes, cost of transportation increases the cost of the medications to the individuals and the other essential medicines are frequently unavailable.
The WHO’s Model list of essential medicines contains cost effective proper treatments regimen that should form the basis of the therapeutic treatment and this only does not applies to the lower or the middle income countries but is also applied to high cost settings, but in most of the cases the costs of the blood glucose lowering medications are costly. In spite of the policies, strengthening of the diabetes management is possible by a standard protocol. Dissemination of the guidelines are the most important steps in the management of diabetes. Hence proper dissemination methods should be taken place to reach the concerned cohort; the older adults. Health promotion campaigns for the target audience are required that require active participation of this age of people.
In conclusion it can be said that , Although WHO have taken up strategies such as WHO Global NCD Action Plan 2013–2020 and WHO diabetes program, the implementation and the dissemination of the strategies does not suffice for this cohort of population suffering from diabetes. The T2D results from modifiable risk factors such as obesity and can be decreased by using a combination of approaches at a population and at an individual level.
References
Bhupathiraju, S. N., & Hu, F. B. (2016). Epidemiology of Obesity and Diabetes and Their Cardiovascular Complications. Circulation Research, 118(11), 1723–1735.
Chatterjee, S., Khunti, K., & Davies, M. J. (2017). Type 2 diabetes. The Lancet, 389(10085), 2239-2251.
Neeland, I. J., Turer, A. T., Ayers, C. R., Powell-Wiley, T. M., Vega, G. L., Farzaneh-Far, R., … & de Lemos, J. A. (2012). Dysfunctional adiposity and the risk of prediabetes and type 2 diabetes in obese adults. Jama, 308(11), 1150-1159.
World Health Organization. (2016). Global reports on diabetes, Retrieved from: https://www.who.int/diabetes/goal/en/
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