POS-277 AN ONLINE SURVEY ON THE AWARENESS OF NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES IN INDIA

Abstract

Awareness is the corner stone for self-care. Prevalence of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) like Diabetes mellitus (DM) and Hypertension are increasing both in developed and developing world. They are associated with end-organ damage, poor quality of life and increased morbidity and mortality. Symptoms of NCDs or its complications appear late, delaying detection and loss of precious time for preventive interventions. It is important therefore for the general public to be aware of NCDs and their complications. The reach of social media is ever expanding being readily available on smart phones and can be put to good use to improve cognizance of NCDs among people. This study was done, with the intention to know the awareness of NCDs among the general public as compared to their knowledge of Corona Virus - COVID (SARS-COV2) infection, while in the midst of the pandemic, and Tuberculosis (TB), for both of which there is a government led education awareness program on traditional and social media in India. This was an online questionnaire survey in 6 Indian languages. The link for the questionnaire, was shared on the social media such as Twitter and Facebook and sent to known WhatsApp groups. They were requested to answer and forward it to their contacts. All the submissions were done between 21-01-2021 and 12-04-2021. Out of a total of 323, duplicates (156) were excluded and 167 responses were analyzed using excel sheet. The average age of the respondents (n=167) was 35.5 years, 159 (95.2%) had at-least 12 years of school education; 65 (38.9%) were males. There were 6.0%, 13.2% and 18.6% of respondents who had not heard of DM, hypertension and kidney diseases respectively; Of these respondents - 10.8%, 10.2% and 4.2% themselves had DM, hypertension and kidney diseases respectively (See Table 1). Among all the respondents, 20.4% and 17.4% could not recognize that high blood sugar was DM and high blood pressure was hypertension respectively. They were not aware that DM (59.9%) and hypertension (70.1%) could cause kidney disease. Among those who had DM, 44.4% were aware that kidney failure was a complication of DM: similarly, 23.53% of those who had hypertension, were aware that kidney failure was a complication of Hypertension. 77.78% of diabetics and 70.59% of hypertensives were aware that the medications should not be stopped even when there are no symptoms (See Table 1). In comparison to NCDs, information about TB and Corona Virus - COVID infection (SARS-COV2) was as follows. 124 (74.25%), were aware about TB; among them, 83.87% recognized blood in sputum as a symptom and 89.52% were aware of the availability of tablets for TB. 146 (87.43%) were aware about COVID, among them 87.1% recognized cough as a symptom and 89.52% were aware of the availability of treatment for COVID. At a time when vaccination for COVID was just being made available, 37.9% were not aware of the Vaccine. (See Table 2). Awareness about NCDs and their complications is poor. School curriculum should include spreading awareness. Even among patients with NCDs, understanding of the disease, tests to be done, symptoms, importance of compliance with medications and complications are lacking. There is an urgent need to appraise people about this. This study was limited by the small sample size, inadequate rural population representation and inherent bias of social media responses.