Author(s):
Padrão, Patrícia
Date: 2013
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10216/71680
Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
Subject(s): Ciências da Saúde
Description
Non-communicable diseases (NCD) are the main cause of mortality worldwide, having
accounted for two thirds of all deaths in 2010. In Mozambique, although communicable
diseases are the most important contributors for the morbidity and mortality burden, NCD are
becoming more frequent, being estimated to have accounted for one fifth of all deaths in
2010.
Worldwide, the most common NCD – cardiovascular (CV) diseases, cancer, chronic
respiratory diseases and diabetes – share four main lifestyle risk factors (harmful use of
alcohol, unhealthy diet, tobacco use, and insufficient physical activity), and frequent
metabolic/physiologic changes (high blood pressure, high fasting blood glucose, high blood
lipids, and overweight/obesity). Surveillance is essential to identify the population groups at
higher risk, in different settings and over time, in order to develop policies for NCD prevention
and control, although evidence from countries undergoing epidemiological transition is scarce.
This thesis aimed to characterize the exposure to excessive alcohol consumption, low
fruit and vegetables intake, tobacco use, and insufficient physical activity, in the adult
Mozambican population (papers I-IV), and to assess the clustering of the latter lifestyles and
metabolic/physiologic risk factors, using a priori (paper V) and a posteriori (paper VI)
approaches. We also aimed to obtain preliminary exploratory data on dietary intake and
culinary practices in Maputo city (paper VII) and to quantify the sodium content of bread sold
in the same region (paper VIII).
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