Gender differential prevalent of overweight and obesity, hypertension and diabetes in South India: A population-based cross-sectional study

Abstract India is facing triple epidemic of Non communicable diseases including high bodymass index, high blood pressure and high blood glucose, that contributing more than half of deaths of all mortality. We investigated the gender specific burden of overweight/obesity, hypertension, diabetes and multimorbidity and their associated risk factors in rural, sub-urban and urban in Tamil Nadu, India. A total of 2976 participants were involved in this study, whereby 865 were rural, 1030 were sub-urban and 1081 were urban population. Overweight and obesity were higher in urban residents (47.5%) compared with rural (31.4%) and sub-urban (34.1%). The prevalence of hypertension was higher in sub-urban (47.1%) than in rural (36.4%) and urban (39.7%), but the mean systolic and diastolic blood pressure were higher in rural than in sub-urban and urban participants. In sub-group analysis, the prevalence of hypertension was higher in both men and women (53.5% and 41.7%) in sub-urban compared with rural (41.9% and 31.3%) and urban (45.9% and 35.5%). The prevalence of diabetes was higher in sub-urban (25.8%) than rural (16.1%) and urban (23%). Diabetes and hypertension was the most common combination of comorbidity in all the three demographical areas. Comparatively, higher prevalence of multimorbidity was found in sub-urban and urban residents than in rural residents. Our data highlight the urgent need for systematic studies to understand the cardiovascular risk factors phenotype and novel environmental risk factors that are associated with overweight/obesity, hypertension and diabetes in all different demographical areas in India.