Introduction
Non-communicable diseases majorly belong to the array of diseases related to cardiovascular, depression, cancer, chronic arthritis and Alzheimer. Even though some of these non-communicable diseases are gravely fatal, the effects on human population just don’t stop there. Most of the chronic disabilities are the results of noncommunicable diseases. The most dangerous part of non-communicable diseases is that they don’t show very obvious signs in the beginning and the signs are often mistaken for some small ailments. Another sad part of non-communicable diseases is that their frequency rises with the age of an individual, because of which it often becomes quite difficult to completely cure the person against these diseases after a while.
Treatment of noncommunicable diseases is another overhead on the financial part. The high increase in the health care costs is majorly related to the treatment of non-communicable diseases, as the burden doesn’t just stay limited to the health care services but also impacts the personal and professional life of the person to a great extent.
History
Protection against non-communicable diseases:
It is possible to follow some steps in order to effectively combat noncommunicable diseases. Some of these strategies are listed below:
1] Regular health check-up so that the detection of a non-communicable disease can be done as early as possible and an early treatment can be done to heal it.
2] Screening process
3] Certain cost effective treatments can be identified at the earliest and treatment can be planned accordingly.
4] Genetic counselling can be considered
5] Proper research
Screening is one of the techniques, which has effectively helped a lot in early detection of non-communicable diseases and timely treatments too. Screening is basically a process of conducting safely driven tests on the individual who doesn’t suspect the particular disease. Screening process has been quite successful for a number of noncommunicable diseases such as colon cancer and breast cancer. The four important points to be considered while performing the screening for a particular disease on an individual are:
1] The disease is significant enough to produce disability or death.
2] The testing strategy for screening is feasible enough.
3] The patient should be willing to accept the screening process in terms of safety, cost and acceptance of the results.
4] In case of the detection, the treatment can be given accordingly and patient is willing to accept the complex process of treatment and side effects.
Features
Apart from obvious fatal or grave diseases, there are certain other factors too that need to be checked in order to prevent non-communicable diseases. One instance of such problem is hypertension. The screening of hypertension when taken into account on the four criteria of screening, gives the following results:
1) Hypertension causes kidney diseases, myocardial infarctions and strokes.
2) A range of tests is available to detect the same, which are safe and low costing.
3) Early detection includes checking high blood pressure which may lead to bad outcomes if prolonged for years. An early treatment can effectively heal the same.
4) Though screening is harmless and costs less, the treatment might be complicated and incur higher costs and side effects.
Tips and comments
No matter how scary the picture of noncommunicable diseases looks, there is always a silver lining to the dark cloud, and the good part is that these diseases can be prevented at the earliest stage for sure. With certain limited and basic prevention and rehabilitation techniques, it is possible to protect yourself against non-communicable diseases in proper time.
