Prevalence of Cardiovascular Risk Factors among Taxi Drivers in Yazd, Iran, 2016

Introduction: Cardiovascular diseases are the first cause of death in the world.Taxi drivers are a high risk group for developing cardiovascular diseases, due toexposure to unhealthy working conditions. The aim of this study was to assessthe prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors among taxi drivers.Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2016 on 110 taxi driversthat were selected by a simple random sampling method. Prevalence ofdyslipidemia, obesity, smoking, hypertension and diabetes were estimated.Descriptive statistics and the extended Fisher exact test were used for dataanalysis.Results: In this study, all participants were male, with mean age and experienceof 46.4±11.6 and 11.3±8.8 years, respectively. Among all subjects, 89.1% had atleast one risk factor, 30% two risk factors, 22.7% three risk factors, 14.5% fourrisk factors, and 4.5% five risk factors. This study showed that prevalence ofhypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia and smoking among subjects were 35.5, 10,66.4 and 12.7, respectively. Also 45.45% and 25.45 % of individuals wereoverweight and obese, respectively.Conclusion: The results of this study showed a high prevalence of cardiovascularrisk factors (especially low HDL-C) among taxi drivers.However, trainingcourses for lifestyle modification can potentially be effective in preventing theoccurrence of cardiovascular diseases in these people.