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Jundishapur Journal of Chronic Disease Care
During middle age, a lot of changes happen in all physical, mental, social, and family aspects of women that may greatly affect the development of diseases and mortality risk.
This research was conducted to determine the extent of chronic diseases in middle-aged women visiting healthcare treatment centers in Ahvaz.
This was a descriptive research study carried on 1266 women of 45-64 years old who were selected using the multistage sampling method. The necessary information was collected through a self-designed questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS V21. Descriptive statistics, t test, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed at 95% level of confidence.
Results showed that 46.8% of these women had one or more chronic diseases as follows: hypertension 12.5%, diabetes mellitus 7.5%, diabetes mellitus with heart diseases or high blood pressure 8.8%, heart diseases 5.8%, heart diseases together with high blood pressure 3.5%, and other diseases 8.7%. The effect of age, number of children, death of husband, occupation, ability to look after oneself, and do housework independently, degree of education, economic status (P < 0.001), age at marriage, and ethnicity (P = 0.001), on chronic diseases were significant.
Considering our results and high prevalence of chronic diseases, especially high blood pressure and diabetes mellitus, in middle-aged women, greater attention must be paid to the screening and monitoring programs of these chronic diseases.
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© 2014, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
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