Primary Care and General Pediatrics

The burden of non-communicable diseases is on the rise in middle and low income countries on top of the existing infectious diseases. Recently in Sudan NCDs accounted for a total of (44%) of the overall mortality. Moreover, the distributions of the specific risk factors are not systematically identified in the country, which hinder the designing of appropriate preventive and control strategies. The objective of this study was to describe the distribution & prevalence of risk factors for non-communicable diseases. This is a descriptive cross-sectional analytic community based study conducted from October to December, 2013 in Wad-Medani city, Gezira State, Sudan.  In this house to house survey, data was collected using structured questionnaires, anthropometric measurements & Blood pressure apparatus. A total of 380 individuals of age 30 years & above were selected for the study by stratified proportional random sampling technique. Data was analyzed using SPSS for Windows version (16.0). The distributions of the various categories of risk factors were identified. The prevalence of smoking for males & females were (18.4%) & (0.3%) respectively, alcohol consumption (3.9%), only among males, consumption of fruits and vegetables below adequate level (72.9%), physical inactivity (75.0%). This study showed Cigarette /tobacco use & personal documented history of NCDs were associated and was found highly statistically significant (p-value <0.005). Similarly there was a statistical significance between association of physical activity with both age & educational level (p-value of 0.003 & 0.011) respectively. Mean systolic & diastolic blood pressures were 135.5 mmHg & 85 mmHg respectively for both sexes. The prevalence of hypertension was (29.7%) on physical assessment for both sexes.  

Based on BMI criteria, (1.6%) were underweight, (35.5%) were overweight and (22.6%) were obese & (0.8%) were severely obese.  The prevalence of central obesity measured by waist circumference revealed that almost a quarter (24.7%) and above half (51.5%) of study participants were having an increased and a substantial increased values respectively. In this study, association between physical inactivity and central obesity was found statistically significant (p-value=0.002). This study also found statistically significant association between personal and family history of NCDs (p-value=0.00).In conclusion, the magnitude of risk factors for non-communicable diseases is considerably high in the study population.