Lifestyle diseases were earlier prevalent among the affluent section of the society.
Now it is proportionately prevailing among all economic sections and is a “new-normal” disease.
A study based on lifestyle diseases explain this crisis.
What are lifestyle diseases?
Lifestyle diseases characterize those diseases whose occurrence is primarily based on the daily habits of people and are a result of an inappropriate relationship of people with their environment.
The main factors contributing to lifestyle diseases include bad food habits, physical inactivity, wrong body posture, and disturbed biological clock.
Lifestyle diseases include, heart disease, and stroke, obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Diseases associated with smoking and alcohol and drug abuse.
The distribution pattern of a range of lifestyle diseases across per capita consumption expenditure of persons has been found by plotting a pseudo-Lorenz curve for morbidity.
Using this the diseases has been classified into “affluent”, “normal” and “deprived”.
The incidence of these three diseases was 7.7% in 2004, shooting up to 17% in 2014.
These classifications are made from the obtained evidence from the surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) on “morbidity in India” in 2004 and 2014.
How does this works?
Pseudo-Lorenz curve– It is curve of income which plots the cumulative percentage of income from source on vertical axis.
Cumulative percentage of population ranked by household income or consumption expenditure on horizontal axis.
Such pseudo-Lorenz curves may be attempted for other items and for this study morbidity has been chosen.
Naturally, the curve lies below the Line of Equal Distribution for items which belong disproportionately more to rich than to poor, like income and, in our case, lifestyle diseases.
However, the curve lying above this line points towards the case when the items disproportionately belong more to poor than to rich.
What does the classification signifies?
Affluent - The diseases under this category hits rich people more than they hit poor.
Normal - The diseases under this category are the ones which proportionately affect all economic sections of the society.
This proportion increased to 34.6% in 2014, clearly suggesting that many more people are now getting struck with “normal” diseases than they used to, in 2004.
This increase is much more in the case of urban India, where incidence of diseases rose from 36% in 2004 to 49.6% in 2014.
In 2004, the incidence of diseases prevailing proportionately among all sections (normal) of the society in rural India was 28.2%.
Our preliminary results show that states with significantly high proportion of “new-normal” diseases are Kerala (rural) and Andhra Pradesh (urban).
For instance, heart-related diseases or diabetes, which were earlier associated with the affluent, are now prevalent among other sections too, particularly in rural areas.
Deprived - The diseases under this category hit poor more than they hit rich.
The study reveals that, in 2004, 64% of the diseases were associated with the deprived section in rural India.
This percentage has gone down to 48.6% in 2014,due to the emergence of new normal lifestyle disease.
