Risk Factors for Non-Communicable Diseases

• Communicable diseases


  Diseases that can be spread from person to person
• Communicable diseases


  Spread by pathogens such as bacteria or viruses
• Non-communicable diseases


  Diseases that cannot be passed from person to person
• Diseases can cause ill health, which is defined as the state of physical and mental well-being
• Causes of ill health


  • Communicable diseases
  • Non-communicable diseases
  • Poor diet
  • High levels of stress
  • Working with harmful chemicals
• People with a defective immune system (e.g. HIV)


  Are much more likely to suffer from infectious diseases (e.g. TB)
• Infection with HPV (human papilloma virus)


  Can cause cervical cancer
• Infection with a pathogen


  Can trigger an allergy (e.g. asthma, dermatitis)
• Physical illness (e.g. arthritis)


  Can trigger a mental illness (e.g. depression)
• Non-communicable disease


  Diseases not spread from person to person, instead caused by risk factors
• In the 1930s, rate of lung cancer began to increase sharply and scientists couldn't explain this
• Scientists could not carry out experiments on humans to try to work out what causes lung cancer as that would be unethical
• Epidemiology


  Studying the patterns of disease to determine risk factors
• Lung cancer is much more common among cigarette smokers than among non-smokers


  Scientists look at how many cigarettes people smoked each day and then how many of these people developed lung cancer
• Correlation


  A link between two variables
• A correlation does not prove cause, it simply suggests that two variables might be linked
• As the number of cigarettes smoked per day increases


  The risk of developing lung cancer also increases
• Positive correlation


  When two variables increase or decrease together
• As the number of years that a person smoked increases

  The risk of developing lung cancer also increases
• Causal mechanism


  The scientific explanation for how a risk factor can cause a disease
• Cigarette smoke contains chemicals which damage DNA and increase the risk of cancer, these are called carcinogens
• Sampling


  Investigating a group of people to draw conclusions about the whole population
• Ideally, we'd look at every single person in a population to investigate a disease-diet link, but in practice it's not possible to sample every single person
• If we select our sample from only one town, it's possible that this does not represent the entire population of the country, so the sample is biased
• To avoid bias in sampling


  • Take as large a sample as possible
  • Ensure the sample is random