Prevalence of Chronic Diseases in Middle-Aged Women

authors:

avatar Poorandokht Afshari 1 , avatar Poorandokht Barzin 1 , * , avatar Shahnaz Najar 1 , avatar Mohammadhosain Haghighizade 2

Nursing and Midwifery College, Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, IR Iran
Health College, Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz , IR Iran

how to cite: Afshari P, Barzin P, Najar S, Haghighizade M. Prevalence of Chronic Diseases in Middle-Aged Women. Jundishapur J Chronic Dis Care. 2014;3(4):23347. https://doi.org/10.17795/jjcdc-23347.

Abstract

Background:

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.

Objectives:

This research was conducted to determine the extent of chronic diseases in middle-aged women visiting healthcare treatment centers in Ahvaz.

Materials and Methods:

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:

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.

Conclusions:

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, Jundishapur Journal of Chronic Disease Care. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited.