The Link Between Health Literacy and Three Conditions of Metabolic Syndrome: Obesity, Diabetes and Hypertension

PURPOSE: Health literacy (HL) intervention could be a potential prevention strategy to reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome (MS), but the association between low HL and MS is controversial. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate whether low HL is associated with obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, considering them as one cluster. METHODS: We used data from the Hamburg Diabetes Prevention Survey, a population-based cross-sectional study in Germany. The 1349 eligible subjects were 18–60 years old. The European Health Literacy Questionnaire (HLS-EU-Q16) was used to assess HL. Depending on the reported number of metabolic syndrome conditions (CMS), four groups were categorized as follows: “0”, any “1”, any “2” and “3” CMS. Ordered logistic regression was used to analyze the relationship between HL level (independent variable) and the reported number of CMS (dependent variable) adjusted for age, gender and education. RESULTS: 63.9% of subjects (n=862) reported having “0”, 25.7% (n=346) only “1”, 8.2% (n=111) only “2” and 2.2% (n=30) “3” of the three CMS. In the group with sufficient HL, rates of “1,” “2,” or “3” CMS were lower than in the group with problematic or inadequate HL. Subjects with inadequate HL showed a 1.62-fold higher risk of having a higher number of CMS than subjects with sufficient HL (OR 1.62; 95% CI 1.13 to 2.31). The risk increased with each life year (OR 1.05; 95% CI 1.04 to 1.06), and was higher in persons with low education (OR 2.89; 95% CI 2.08 to 4.01) than in highly educated persons. Women showed lower risk (OR 0.73; 95% CI 0.58 to 0.91) than men. CONCLUSION: Lower HL was associated with a higher number of MS conditions. Our findings suggest that HL intervention on health-promoting behaviors could help reduce MS risk in people with limited HL.