scholarly journals Effect of Obesity and Other Risk Factors on Hypertension among Women of Reproductive Age in Ghana: An Instrumental Variable Probit Model

Author(s):  
Abayomi Samuel Oyekale

Background: The growing incidence of mortality as a result cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) is a major public health concern in several developing countries. In Ghana, unhealthy food consumption pattern and sedentary lifestyle are promoting overweight and obesity, with significant consequences on the incidence of CVDs. Specifically, hypertension morbidity is now a public health concern among Ghanaian health policy makers. This paper analysed the effect of body mass index (BMI)/arm circumference and other associated factors on hypertension risk among women of reproductive ages in Ghana. Methods: The data were collected as Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) in 2014. This paper analysed the subset of the data that were collected from eligible women 15–49 years of age. The total sample was 9396, while 9367 gave consents to have their blood pressure measured. Data were analysed with instrumental probit regression model with consideration of potential endogeneity of BMI and arm circumference. Results: The results showed that 25% of the women were either overweight or obese, while 13.28% were hypertensive. Women from the Greater Accra (18.15%), Ashanti (15.53%) and Volta (15.02%) regions had the highest incidences of hypertension. BMI and arm circumferences were truly endogenous and positively associated with the probability of being hypertensive. Other factors that influenced hypertension were age of women, region of residence, urban/rural residence, being pregnant, access to medical insurance, currently working, consumption of broth cubes, processed can meats, salted meat and fruits. Conclusion: It was concluded that hypertension risk was positively associated with being overweight, obesity, age and consumption of salted meat.It was inter aliaemphasized that engagement in healthy eating with less consumption of salted meats, and more consumption of fruits would assist in controlling hypertension among Ghanaian women.

Author(s):  
Bethan Evans ◽  
Charlotte Cooper

Over the last twenty years or so, fatness, pathologised as overweight and obesity, has been a core public health concern around which has grown a lucrative international weight loss industry. Referred to as a ‘time bomb’ and ‘the terror within’, analogies of ‘war’ circulate around obesity, framing fatness as enemy.2 Religious imagery and cultural and moral ideologies inform medical, popular and policy language with the ‘sins’ of ‘gluttony’ and ‘sloth’, evoked to frame fat people as immoral at worst and unknowledgeable victims at best, and understandings of fatness intersect with gender, class, age, sexuality, disability and race to make some fat bodies more problematically fat than others. As Evans and Colls argue, drawing on Michel Foucault, a combination of medical and moral knowledges produces the powerful ‘obesity truths’ through which fatness is framed as universally abject and pathological. Dominant and medicalised discourses of fatness (as obesity) leave little room for alternative understandings.


Author(s):  
Pratibha U. Mulik ◽  
Sudam R. Suryawanshi

Background: After comparing data of NFHS-3 and 4, prevalence of overweight and obesity in women of an urban population almost doubled in 10 yr. So, the causes of increasing prevalence need to be studied as public health concern. Objective of the study is to determine prevalence of overweight and obesity among reproductive age group (15-49 years) of women in an urban slum of Mumbai.Methods: Total 220 women were selected among 11 sectors from A to K by simple random method and data collected by using validated questionnaire. WHO’s classification was used to classify as overweight and obese.Results: Out of 220 women participated in study, 14 (6.36%) were obese, 75 (34.09%) were overweight according to BMI and 17 (7.7%) were found to be obese according to waist to hip ratio. From the present study it was seen that age group of the women, socio economic class, education, history of hypothyroidism, family history of obesity, types of work women do, hours of television watching, calorie and fat intake, had a significant relationship with BMI, whereas physical exercise they used to do and tendency to sleep in the afternoon and hours of sleep in the night had non-significant relationship with BMI.Conclusions: Obesity and overweight is found to be a growing public health problem and can be preventable. Interventional measures include developing healthy eating habits, regular moderate physical exercise, sleeping habits, health camps for screening of overweight and obesity.


2004 ◽  
Vol 8 (32) ◽  
Author(s):  

Resistance to antimicrobials has become a major public health concern, and it has been shown that there is a relationship, albeit complex, between antimicrobial resistance and consumption


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