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