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The Transition to Noncommunicable Disease: How to Reduce Its Unsustainable Global Burden by Increasing Cognitive Access to Health Self-Management
The global epidemic of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, is creating unsustainable burdens on health systems worldwide. NCDs are treatable but not curable. They are less amenable to top-down prevention and control than are the infectious diseases now in re...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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MDPI
2021
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8705641/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34940383 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9040061 |
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author | Gottfredson, Linda S. |
author_facet | Gottfredson, Linda S. |
author_sort | Gottfredson, Linda S. |
collection | PubMed |
description | The global epidemic of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, is creating unsustainable burdens on health systems worldwide. NCDs are treatable but not curable. They are less amenable to top-down prevention and control than are the infectious diseases now in retreat. NCDs are mostly preventable, but only individuals themselves have the power to prevent and manage the diseases to which the enticements of modernity and rising prosperity have made them so susceptible (e.g., tobacco, fat-salt-carbohydrate laden food products). Rates of nonadherence to healthcare regimens for controlling NCDs are high, despite the predictable long-term ravages of not self-managing an NCD effectively. I use international data on adult functional literacy to show why the cognitive demands of today’s NCD self-management (NCD-SM) regimens invite nonadherence, especially among individuals of below-average or declining cognitive capacity. I then describe ways to improve the cognitive accessibility of NCD-SM regimens, where required, so that more patients are better able and motivated to self-manage and less likely to err in life-threatening ways. For the healthcare professions, I list tools they can develop and deploy to increase patients’ cognitive access to NCD-SM. Epidemiologists could identify more WHO “best buy” interventions to slow or reverse the world’s “slow-motion disaster” of NCDs were they to add two neglected variables when modeling the rising burdens of disease. The neglected two are both cognitive: the distribution of cognitive capacity levels of people in a population and the cognitive complexity of their health environments. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8705641 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-87056412021-12-25 The Transition to Noncommunicable Disease: How to Reduce Its Unsustainable Global Burden by Increasing Cognitive Access to Health Self-Management Gottfredson, Linda S. J Intell Article The global epidemic of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, is creating unsustainable burdens on health systems worldwide. NCDs are treatable but not curable. They are less amenable to top-down prevention and control than are the infectious diseases now in retreat. NCDs are mostly preventable, but only individuals themselves have the power to prevent and manage the diseases to which the enticements of modernity and rising prosperity have made them so susceptible (e.g., tobacco, fat-salt-carbohydrate laden food products). Rates of nonadherence to healthcare regimens for controlling NCDs are high, despite the predictable long-term ravages of not self-managing an NCD effectively. I use international data on adult functional literacy to show why the cognitive demands of today’s NCD self-management (NCD-SM) regimens invite nonadherence, especially among individuals of below-average or declining cognitive capacity. I then describe ways to improve the cognitive accessibility of NCD-SM regimens, where required, so that more patients are better able and motivated to self-manage and less likely to err in life-threatening ways. For the healthcare professions, I list tools they can develop and deploy to increase patients’ cognitive access to NCD-SM. Epidemiologists could identify more WHO “best buy” interventions to slow or reverse the world’s “slow-motion disaster” of NCDs were they to add two neglected variables when modeling the rising burdens of disease. The neglected two are both cognitive: the distribution of cognitive capacity levels of people in a population and the cognitive complexity of their health environments. MDPI 2021-12-09 /pmc/articles/PMC8705641/ /pubmed/34940383 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9040061 Text en © 2021 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Gottfredson, Linda S. The Transition to Noncommunicable Disease: How to Reduce Its Unsustainable Global Burden by Increasing Cognitive Access to Health Self-Management |
title | The Transition to Noncommunicable Disease: How to Reduce Its Unsustainable Global Burden by Increasing Cognitive Access to Health Self-Management |
title_full | The Transition to Noncommunicable Disease: How to Reduce Its Unsustainable Global Burden by Increasing Cognitive Access to Health Self-Management |
title_fullStr | The Transition to Noncommunicable Disease: How to Reduce Its Unsustainable Global Burden by Increasing Cognitive Access to Health Self-Management |
title_full_unstemmed | The Transition to Noncommunicable Disease: How to Reduce Its Unsustainable Global Burden by Increasing Cognitive Access to Health Self-Management |
title_short | The Transition to Noncommunicable Disease: How to Reduce Its Unsustainable Global Burden by Increasing Cognitive Access to Health Self-Management |
title_sort | transition to noncommunicable disease: how to reduce its unsustainable global burden by increasing cognitive access to health self-management |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8705641/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34940383 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9040061 |
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