Urbanization and Health in Taiwan: A Population-based National Survey

• Main Authors: Jiun-Wei Shih, 施鈞偉
• Other Authors: Shu-Chen Hu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96799866732993768143

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 公共衛生研究所 === 96 === Background: Recently, people from the rural area migrating to the urbans is ongoing worldwide, and the urbanized speed continues to increase. However, under the population transitiona, there is a huge impact of local resource assignments, formulation of economic policy, and the human health. Objective: To explore whether inhabitant's health condition and health behavior have differences between urbanization level of the inhabit area in Taiwan. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study, analysis secondary data from“ The 2002 Study on Health Promotion Knowledge, Attitude and Behavior of Taiwan People” , the questionnaire content includes the demography data, health condition and health behavior. According to urbanization level of inhabited area are divided into three levels, explore the relationship between urbanization and inhabitant's health in Taiwan. Results: After controlling sex and education factors, in the health status aspect, there were shown J curve generally. Despite the fact that there were positive linear relation with urbanization level on hyper tension, male diabetes mellitus, and male depression morbidity, there were non-significant on female obesity, female heart disease, and female diabetes mellitus morbidity(P<0.001). In the health behavior aspect, there were positive linear relation with urbanization level generally; contrarily, doing exercise frequency, eating break fast, and chewing betel nut were negative linear relation with urbanization level. On the other hand, there were non-significant on eating fruit, female’s eating breakfast, and male’s smoking(P<0.001). Conclusions: Between the different urbanization level, areas with inhabitant’s health condition and behavior showed different situations. These differences might be due to the different living conditions and lifestyles. Therefore, when we formulate and administer a health policy or intervention, we must consider the area’s characteristics and the local disease conditions, so we can effectively promote inhabitant's health, and improve the disparity of urban-rural health condition.