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The life expectancy of Korean men has reached 74 years, compared to 80 for Korean women. But these are averages, and any individual's hope of reaching or exceeding that age is threatened at every turn by illnesses, many of them preventable by a healthy lifestyle. Now a report by the preventive medicine departments of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul National University and Korea University looks for the first time at the "disease burden" -- the welter of preventable illnesses that threaten longevity -- in the form of an epidemiology index based on data about diseases that cause early incapacity or death. The study covered 1.2 million people who died or fell ill from 1998 to 2002.
¡ß Causes of Impairment
The most common diseases that restrict patients' activities are diabetes, gastric ulcers, asthma, stroke and rheumatoid arthritis. Diabetes is the greatest and most common danger to quality of life. Some 500,000 people are newly diagnosed with the disease every year, and 8.4 percent of the population are treated for it. Gastric and duodenal ulcers are next. They, too are eminently preventable, since stress and heliobacter pylori are their main causes. Doctors see a clear connection between the life patterns of most Koreans and the high levels of stress and heliobacter infection.
Asthma comes in third, with patients ranging from babies to elderly people. It followed by cerebrovascular diseases including stroke, which show a high rate of disability in surviving sufferers, causing serious damage to the nervous system. Rheumatoid arthritis, which is especially common in women, requires patients to continue taking drugs all their life and causes articular deformity and chronic pain, forcing patients to restrict their activities. Other such diseases include depression, heart attack, allergies and tympanitis.
¡ß Early Killers
Among the causes of early death, stroke leads unchallenged, followed by traffic accidents, suicide, cirrhosis of the liver and cancer. Stroke leads among diseases causing early death. People in their 60s and 70s are two to four times more likely to die of stroke than any other diseases. Traffic accidents, of course, are not a disease and can hit people of all ages, but perhaps they were included because they, too, are preventable. Some say fastening your seat belt is more important for longevity than exercise or renouncing tobacco. Other early killers are liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, gastric cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer, diabetes, and cardiac infarction. But all forms taken together make cancer the chief cause of early death.
¡ß Gender
A man who goes to a high school reunion 40 years after graduation may well find that one out of every six of his friends is dead. Some 16.6 percent of men die between 15 and 59 -- for women, the proportion is 6.1 percent. In middle age, many more Korean men than women suffer cardiac, vascular and liver diseases, probably because they drink too hard and exercise too little.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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