• Prevention of Disease

    Prevention of Disease

    According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control: the leading causes of death in the United States for 2011 (the latest year that the data is available on their website) were in order as follows:

    1- Heart disease
    2- Cancer
    3- Chronic Respiratory Diseases
    4- Stroke
    5- Accidents
    6- Alzheimer’s
    7- Diabetes
    8- Influenza and Pneumonia
    9- Nephritis (kidney disease)
    10- Suicide
    11- Septicemia
    12- Chronic Liver Disease and cirrhosis
    13- High Blood Pressure
    14- Parkinson’s disease
    15- Aspiration pneumonia

    http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf

    Worldwide the list the that World Health Organization that has assembled is somewhat different reflecting a greater impact of infectious diseases on mortality rates and, unfortunately, a greater number of people dying before they reach adulthood. The top ten causes of death in the WHO list are:

    1- Heart Disease
    2- Stroke
    3- Lower Respiratory Infection
    4- Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
    5- Diarrheal Diseases
    6- HIV/AIDS
    7- Cancer of the Trachea, Bronchus and Lungs
    8- Diabetes
    9- Road Injury
    10- Prematurity

    http://who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index3.html

    There are many medical diagnoses and diseases over which we have not control but there are many activities and lifestyle decisions that can directly effect our health and prevent or reduce our risk of contributing prematurely to one of the above statistics on either list. These are:

    1-Tobacco use
    2- excess alcohol consumption
    3- obesity
    4- lack of exercise
    5- poor diet and
    6- risky lifestyle choices

    Most of us are fortunate enough to be able to exert some control and change over these behaviors. Guidelines on altering these risk behaviors and other means of prevention will be topics for future blogs. KOR

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