Multimorbidity in Iranian women: result of a large-scale cohort study in Iran

Background: Population aging will be a significant challenge for Iranians especially in women in the upcoming decades. The prevalence of chronic diseases increases by age, and so, with longer life expectancy, the number of affected women will have a sharper rise. Multimorbidity has been defined as the co-occurrence of two or more chronic diseases in an individual. This is a growing public health problem and is known to be associated with gaps in quality of care and prohibitive costs and an important challenge facing health care systems. This study aims to assess multimorbidity and the associated risk factors in the women population aged 40 to 75 years from the Golestan Cohort Study (GCS). Methods: The study was carried out as a cross-sectional analysis of baseline information in the women population from the GCS. The frequency of certain self-reported chronic diseases, multimorbidity as well as its association with demographic factors, lifestyle, anthropometric indices, and socio-economic factors was analyzed using SPSS V. 21.0. P-value less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant.Results: Overall, 25.0% of the 28,412 women aged 40 to 75 years had multimorbidity. Gastroesophageal reflux disease (78.6%), cardiovascular diseases (75.7%), diabetes (25.7%), and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (21.5%) were the most common self-reported chronic diseases in women with multimorbidity. The odds of multimorbidity increased significantly with advancing age (p < 0.001). The most important risk factors for multimorbidity were low SES, unemployment, unmarried, physical inactivity, high BMI, abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, used to smoke, opium use, high DMFT and poor oral health (all p < 0.05). High gravidity and parity (> = 5) had positive correlation (p < 0.001), while higher education levels in women had an inverse association with multimorbidity and seems to have protective effect (p < 0.001). Conclusion: This study showed that multimorbidity and several modifiable lifestyle risk factors that were common among Iranian women in middle ages and over. Promoting a healthy lifestyle early among youngsters and managing risk factors could potentially have significant impact on the development of multimorbidity, reduce the burden of disease, prevent premature mortality, and improve quality of life in ageing women

کلیدواژه ها:

Multimorbidity ، modifiable lifestyle factors ، women’s health ، Golestan Cohort Study ، Iran