Risk Factors of Disability

Disability can be caused due to mental or physical impairment or due to some injury or disease like cancer, blindness, deafness and anxiety disorders. The well being and health are affected by many factors and if they are linked with disability, ill health or death then they are known as risk factors. Risk factors depend on each individual and on their disease. These risk factors do not operate in isolation but they often interact and coexist with one another. The risk factors are divided into various categories such as environmental, behavioural, demographic, biomedical and genetic.

Environmental Risk Factors

These risk factors include:-

• Physical, biological and chemical – These risk factors greatly affect the health of the disabled people and lead to change in behaviour.
• Social, cultural, economic and political – Social factors can be found within the individual or externally such as schools, family and community and these play a very important role and self-control, social skills, good health and self-esteem cannot be achieved. Similarly, without the cultural, political and economic factors, the growth and development of their behaviour and personal skills cannot be achieved.

Behavioural Risk Factors

There are certain behavioural risk factors which can influence the lifestyle of a particular individual and they are:-

• Excessive sun exposure – There are some health benefits from sun exposure such as it stimulates the production of Vitamin D to the body and improves mental wellbeing but there are some factors which increase the risk of developing sunburn, damage to the eyes, itchiness, rashes and dryness, skin cancer etc.
• Excessive Alcohol Consumption – Excessive intake of alcohol increase the risk such as memory lapse, breast, liver and oral cancers, road traffic accidents etc.
• Poor Diet and Nutrition – Coronary heart disease, hypertension, stroke and cancer are some of the risk factors due to poor diet and nutrition which can be the cause of illness, disability and death.

Some other risk factors include tobacco smoking, insufficient vaccination, physicalinactivity and unprotected sexual activity.

Demographic Risk Factors

These factors consist of sex, age and population subgroups. These factors can increase the risk such as:-

• These factors increase the risk of developing breast cancer in women in the ratio of 1:11 and in men in the ratio of 1:1426.
• It increases the stroke death rates according to age up to 81 percent.
• The people more often suffer from rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease which can even lead to death.

Biomedical Risk Factors

These risk factors include:-

• High Blood Cholesterol – This risk factor increase the chances of developing coronary heart disease.
• Overweight and Obesity – This risk factor can lead to high blood pressure, reproductive problems for women, cardiovascular disease and osteoarthritis.
• Impaired Glucose Tolerance – This is a risk factor which results into heart disease and diabetes.
• High Blood Pressure – This risk factor increase the chances of heart failure, renal failure, stroke and peripheral vascular disease.

Genetic Risk Factors

Some diseases are the result of individual genetic make up such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. Some risk factors lead to Down syndrome, Haemophilia and Asthma.