Behavioral Changes to avoid Health Risk Factors after Periodic Health Examination

Cho, Belong

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The most important thing to prevent diseases and to promote health is to change or remove health risk factors. One of the trials to improve health status by changing the health risk factors is to appraise health risk factors and to counsel about these factors during the health examination. This study is aimed to evaluate the effects of the 'health examination' on changes of health risk factors.
METHODS
The medical records of the clients who have taken health examinations more than twice from June 1991 to March 1996 at a health examination center were reviewed. Those health risk factors were compared between pre- and post- health examination.
RESULTS
The selected medical records accounted to 1,045. The study subjEcts consist of 758(72.5%) male. Mean age is 47.9+/-7.6 years(range 18~80). The health risk factors before health examination consisted of smoking(39% ), non-exercise(34% ), negativity of HBsAb(29.1%), obesity(18.3%), irregular diet habit(17.6%), high salt ingestion(14.1%), alcohol(1%). Also high cholesterolemia(46.2%), high blood pressure(10.7%), high uric acidemia(7.1%), high glycemia(1.6%) were found. The health risk factors such as smoking drinking, cholesterolemia, uric acidemia, blood pressure seemed to be controlled well. But, the factors like exercise, diet habit, salt ingestion, HBsAb, obesity, glucose appeared not to be controlled adequately.
CONCLUSIONS
Behavioral changes to avoid health risk factors after periodic health examination were shown only In some kinds of health risk factors such as smoking and alcohol drinking and in males or those who showed high health risk factor score(total score > 6) in the first health examination.