Risk Factors for non-communicable diseases in Mozambique.

Abstract

Non-communicable diseases (NCD) are the main cause of mortality worldwide, having accounted for two thirds of all deaths in 2010. In Mozambique, although communicable diseases are the most important contributors for the morbidity and mortality burden, NCD are becoming more frequent, being estimated to have accounted for one fifth of all deaths in 2010. Worldwide, the most common NCD - cardiovascular (CV) diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes - share four main lifestyle risk factors (harmful use of alcohol, unhealthy diet, tobacco use, and insufficient physical activity), and frequent metabolic/physiologic changes (high blood pressure, high fasting blood glucose, high blood lipids, and overweight/obesity). Surveillance is essential to identify the population groups at higher risk, in different settings and over time, in order to develop policies for NCD prevention and control, although evidence from countries undergoing epidemiological transition is scarce. This thesis aimed to characterize the exposure to excessive alcohol consumption, low fruit and vegetables intake, tobacco use, and insufficient physical activity, in the adult Mozambican population (papers I-IV), and to assess the clustering of the latter lifestyles and metabolic/physiologic risk factors, using a priori (paper V) and a posteriori (paper VI) approaches. We also aimed to obtain preliminary exploratory data on dietary intake and culinary practices in Maputo city (paper VII) and to quantify the sodium content of bread sold in the same region (paper VIII). (...)