• Login
• Admin

Liu, Lefan, Qian, Xujun, Chen, Zhuo and He, Tianfeng (2020) Health literacy and its effect on chronic disease prevention: evidence from China’s data. BMC Public Health, 20 (1). ISSN 1471-2458

Preview

PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader Available under Licence Creative Commons Attribution. Download (601kB) | Preview

Abstract

Background: Improving health literacy is an important public health goal in many countries. Although many studies have suggested that low health literacy has adverse effects on an individual’s health outcomes, confounding factors are often not accounted. This paper examines the interplay between health literacy and chronic disease prevention.

Methods: A population-based sample of 8194 participants aged 15–69 years old in Ningbo were used from China’s 2017 National Health Literacy Surveillance Data. We use multivariate regression analysis to disentangle the relationship between health literacy and chronic disease prevention.

Results: We find the association between health literacy and the occurrence of the first chronic condition is attenuated after we adjust the results for age and education. This might arise because having one or more chronic conditions is associated with better knowledge about chronic diseases, thus improve their health literacy. More importantly, we find health literacy is associated with a reduction in the likelihood of having a comorbid condition. However, this protective effect is only found among urban residents, suggesting health literacy might be a key factor explaining the rural-urban disparity in health outcomes.

Conclusion: Our findings highlight the important role of health literacy in preventing comorbidities instead of preventing the first chronic condition. Moreover, family support could help improve health literacy and result in beneficial effects on health.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Health literacy, Chronic disease prevention, Risk perception, Comorbidity, China, Rural-urban disparity
Schools/Departments:	University of Nottingham Ningbo China > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Economics
Identification Number:	doi: 0.1186/s12889-020-08804-4
Depositing User:	Zhou, Elsie
Date Deposited:	10 Jun 2020 01:27
Last Modified:	11 Jun 2020 02:25
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/60831

Actions (Archive Staff Only)

Edit View