Community Teaching Tool Project

Community Teaching Tool Project

Introduction

In this paper community members vulnerable to different types of diseases will be identified. Health promotion and disease prevention methods will be discussed. This paper will base on the studies conducted by the United States Department of Health & Human Services. Focus will be towards the group of community members which was identified to be more prone to diseases than others. The trends of nutrition imbalance and obesity among middle aged women living in the US and their affects will be discussed along with the need for physical activities and their impact on the health of the citizens. The steps and interventions will be suggested to be taken to tackle with the predicted problems. In the end resources specific to the Greater Cleveland, which are available to the vulnerable community will be identified.

Discussion

Epidemiological Data Search

According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) the most lethal chronic diseases in the US are diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. HHS claims that these diseases are responsible for every seven deaths out of ten. Every year, they result in developing a huge number of seriously ill and disabled citizens. These diseases contribute to a big proportion of annual health care costs.

The Centre of Disease Control (CDC) claims that the main cause of both diabetes and cardiovascular diseases is obesity. 80% of those having obesity have at least one type of diabetes as well and are at least 7 times more prone to cardiovascular diseases then a non-obese person. Since, more than one-third (35.7%) of the population of US are obese. Therefore, obesity is contributing by a large proportion in increase of diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. According to CDC, in 2008, obese people spent $147 billion on health care, which is $1429 more than people having normal weight.

Not only diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, research has shown that obesity increases the risk of many other physical and mental conditions. These co-morbidities are most commonly shown in metabolic syndrome, a combination of medical disorders which includes: diabetes mellitus type 2, high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, and high triglyceride levels.

Figure 1: Obesity and Morbidity

According to a research conducted by James Heilman, MD, middle aged women who have never smoked and have a BMI between 40 and 50 are 2.5 times more prone to death.

Figure 1: Relative Risk of Mortality by BMI in Women who have never smoked.

Identification of Vulnerable Population

Obesity being one of the most common diseases in the US which causes several other diseases like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, adverse lipid concentrations, hypertension and disabilities is taken as the major area of focus in this paper. The prevalence of obesity has increased several folds during last few decades; in 2010, 35.7% of US adults were obese. Although, there is no significant difference between obese men and women, mostly people aged 60 or above are obese. Obesity is distributed evenly throughout different age groups of men, though, in women, those aged over 60 contribute to ...