Socio Economic and Demographic Differentials in the Prevalence of Chronic Diseases across States in North East India (Evidences From DLHS 4)

There is a number of literature on chronic diseases at global level and even to some extend at the country level in India describing the trends, pattern and significant of such diseases, but however the same is still very few in regions like North Eastern States of the India. In the above backdrop, the present study aims to explore the pattern and prevalence of the some of the common chronic diseases across the North eastern states by some socio economic and demographic characteristics.District level household and facility survey-4 (DLHS-4), which is a nationwide survey conducted during 2012-13 gather information also on the prevalence of morbidity for a wide range of communicable and noncommunicable diseases. Across seven states in North east except Assam, information in a household questionnaire were collected from a total of 264263 household members. The data was utilized to perform the analysis to achieve the objectives of the study where various analysis viz frequency, cross tabulation and chi square test were perform on the appropriate variables to obtained the desired results.The five mostly diagnosed chronic diseases reported among the sampled household members in the North eastern States taken as a whole in a decreasing order of incidences are hernia, followed by hypertension, diabetes, asthma and lastly those diagnosed with chronic liver diseases. The above chronic diseases constitutes about 46.3% of all reported diseases among households members and the study also reveals existence of differentials in the prevalence by age, sex and standard of living across the seven states.