Cardiovascular Diseases in Relation to Anthropometric, Biochemical and Dietary Intake in Women: A Case Control Study.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are one of the leading causes of disability and premature deaths in adults worldwide, low income to middle income countries bear the brunt by accounting for over 80% of the global disease burden and overwhelming health expenditures amounting to billions of dollars annually. The prevalence of CVDs increases with advancing age and varies among racial, ethnic, geographic, and socio-demographic groups. CVDs account for 17.3 million deaths per year that are likely to reach 23.6 million deaths per year by 2030.3 The social and economic implications of CVDs in terms of increased burden on the healthcare system, family sufferings, Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost, reduced productivity and economic outputs are enormous and well documented.
Women share a greater burden of CVDs than men due to sedentary lifestyles, reproductive stress and poor dietary intake. CVDs shorten the life expectancy of women by about 5 years as compared to non-CVDs women.10 In Pakistan, CVDs account for 19% of all the deaths occurring among adults aged 30-70 years.
Dietary energy, carbohydrates, protein, fat and iron intakes of the cases and controls shown in Table 3 revealed that the cases had significantly lower mean dietary energy, carbohydrates, protein and fat intakes than the controls but there was no significant difference in the mean dietary iron intake between the cases and controls. The demographic and socio-economic characteristics of cases and controls presented in Table 4 show that 95% of the women from cases and 86% of the women from the controls had education up to secondary school level and there was no significant association between education.
Obes Res Open J. 2015; 2(1): 32-38. doi: 10.17140/OROJ-2-106
