Cardiovascular risk factors rise more among less wealthy and less educated

Major risk factors for cardiovascular diseases like unhealthy weight gain, diabetes, and high blood pressure have grown faster among the less educated and less wealthy Indians sweeping the population and impacting the rural areas as much as the urban landscape, public health researchers have found.

An international team comprising medical researchers from Germany, USA and India used the last two editions of the National Family Health Survey to map how the prevalence patterns of such risk factors have changed between 2015-16 and 2019-21.

Their study’s findings imply that cardiovascular diseases can no longer be characterized as a wealthy urban phenomenon.

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“We can’t have the luxury of assuming that these are the problems of mainly the urban affluent class as the risk factors are growing fast in rural areas and among less affluent people. It’s time for the government to think about a nation-wide plan to allocate more resources to tackle the surge of non-communicable diseases,” Nikhil Tandon, one of the team members and a professor at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi told DH.

After analysing data on more than 15.5 lakh individuals, the researchers found that while there has been a rise in unhealthy weight gain across all socioeconomic groups between 2015-16 and 2019-21, the gains were higher in the less educated and less wealthy people.

The prevalence of diabetes and high blood pressure too went up more in the disadvantaged subpopulations, but stayed the same or even declined among the educated and the wealthy. Smoking has declined for all.

In 2015–16, the extent of both overweight and obesity was higher among wealthier and educated people, but the magnitude of change in overweight in the next four years was substantially more prominent among people with low socio-economic status.

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This corresponds to a 29.5 per cent increase among the uneducated compared to a just 7.6 per cent increase among those with the highest level of education. Similarly the poorest witnessed more than 78 per cent rise in overweight while the richest experienced a more modest change of 8.33 per cent increase.

Similarly hypertension increased by 7.41 per cent among those with no education and by 12.66 per cent among the poorest section of the people, but dropped by 18 per cent in people with higher education and by 12.57 per cent among the richest individuals surveyed, the researchers reported in the study published in the Lancet Regional Health South East Asia.

Diabetes increased by 24 per cent among the poorest and by 21 per cent among those without education, but decreased by 7 per cent in both the richest groups and those with the highest education.

“Its time to focus on bidi control, impose more taxes on alcohol to restrict consumption by the youth, launch campaigns against processed foods and encourage physical activities,” noted Dorairaj Prabhakaran, another member of the study team and director of Centre for Chronic Disease Control, Delhi.