[Identification of the main risk factors for non infectious diseases: method of classification trees]

There is presented ideology of the application of one of the methods for assessment of the influence of multi-factor influence of risk factors on population health--the method of classification trees. The method of classification trees is a hierarchical procedure for constructing a decision rule that allows to divide the population into groups with higher and lower morbidity "in the coordinates of" risk factors. The main advantage of the method--the possibility of finding the complex of risk factors having the greatest impact on the health of the population (in contrast to common methods, analyzing only the single-factor effects). In the paper there are presented two possible variants of application of classification trees: 1) the finding of the complex of environmental risk factors (RF), which provides the maximum impact on the prevalence of non infectious diseases in preschool children) in Yekaterinburg (environmental risk factors--the pollution of air drinking water, in the presence of a gas stove in the child's flat, etc.). It is shown that, together with socio-economic risk factors environmental risk factors increase the prevalence of respiratory diseases in preschool children in Ekaterinburg in 2.5-4 times (depending on the list and the number of environmental RF), 2) finding the complex of non-environmental factors that most effectively compensating the negative effect of environmental pollution on human health. This posing of the problem is associated with the fact that pollution environmental factors are (usually) unmodified, while family, behavioral or social factors can be partially or completely eliminated Implementation of the recommendations presented in the paper can reduce the incidence of circulatory diseases in preschool children in Yekaterinburg more than 2 times.