Population attributable risk fraction for selected chronic diseases in India

India's current health transition stage poses a critical challenge of dealing with the unfinished agenda of communicable diseases and the steadily rising burden of noncommunicable diseases. A significant burden of chronic diseases in India is attributable to household and individual level health risk factors coupled with socioeconomic conditions. From this perspective, this article made a first time effort to assess disease burden attributable to health risk factors using cross-sectional population health survey data.

Population attributable fractions (PAF) were estimated for a cluster of health risk factors that include unsafe water, lack of sanitation, exposure to cooking smoke, tobacco and alcohol use, physical inactivity, and socioeconomic conditions on a set of widely prevalent chronic diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhea, diabetes, angina, and asthma. Data from the 2003 World Health Survey was used.

The analysis revealed evidence of a significant contribution of health risk factors to India's escalating chronic disease burden. The contribution of health risk factors toward chronic disease burden varied by residence.

Results suggest that promotional health care based policies to deal with health risks should be a major priority in policy agenda to combat with the challenge of emerging noncommunicable disease coupled with the persistent burden of communicable diseases. Disease burden in India could be halved by effectively modifying exposure to the risk factors through promotional health care.