risk factors - NC diseases

• Risk factor

  Anything that increases the chance that a person will develop a certain disease during a lifetime
• Risk factors don't guarantee that the person will catch the disease, they just increase the chance of it happening
• Types of risk factors

  • Aspects of a person's lifestyle
  • Substances in the person's body
  • Substances in the person's environment
• Risk factors interact to influence one particular disease


  For example, diet, obesity, smoking and lack of exercise all contribute to cardiovascular disease
• Certain risk factors directly cause a disease

  For example, smoking directly causes cardiovascular disease, lung disease and lung cancer
• Drinking too much alcohol


  Can cause liver disease
• Smoking or drinking while pregnant


  Includes a whole range of health problems for the unborn baby
• Obesity


  Can be caused by poor diet and lack of exercise, and can go on to cause type-2 diabetes and cancer
• Exposure to substances like asbestos or radiation

  Can directly cause cancer
• Diseases don't just affect the individual who has the disease, they also impact their family, friends and sometimes their entire country
• When somebody gets ill, they often rely on their friends and family to support them, and if they're really ill they might not be able to work which means that their whole family gets poorer
• On a national scale, if there's more disease, the workforce will be less productive and a bigger share of government spending will have to be spent on health in order to try and reduce the burden of disease
• Scientists need to find out who catches each type of disease and why, and what they found is that certain groups of people are more likely to have certain risk factors than others, and so those groups have a higher incidence of the associated diseases
• Globally, people in developed countries like the UK with higher incomes are more likely to eat too much unhealthy food and live a sedentary lifestyle, and these risk factors are part of the reason why obesity and associated diseases are such a problem in developed countries
• Within the UK, people from more deprived areas are more likely to smoke, have a poor diet and not exercise enough, so we see more cases of cardiovascular disease and obesity in those deprived areas
• The key takeaway is that there are loads of risk factors that affect our chances of getting a disease, and although many of them are out of our control, lots of them are, and the choices that we make have a big impact on how healthy we end up being