Prevention is better than treatment: the case of Qatar

Abstract

“Prevention is better than treatment”, says an old Arab proverb, yet unfortunately for many Arabs today, medical treatment is the main method of dealing with diseases and risk factors. In a recent Population Health Metrics publication, “The diabetes-obesity-hypertension nexus in Qatar: evidence from the World Health Survey”, [1] Ali et al. analyzed data from the World Health Organization’s World Health Survey conducted in Qatar in 2006. The findings revealed remarkably high prevalences of obesity (35.4%), diabetes (16.4%), and hypertension (18.7%). These levels of established risk factors for major vascular diseases are all the more alarming in a young population. Indeed, the findings call for urgent and greatly strengthened non-communicable disease prevention as a priority in the country and, more broadly, in the region. The study, admittedly, has some limitations. It is crosssectional and therefore not able to establish causation. Furthermore, it is possible that the authors may have overestimated the burden of chronic diseases and levels of risk factor exposure since survey nonrespondents may be healthier than respondents; in the Gulf region, individuals with medical conditions may be more likely to respond to health surveys for a number of reasons. Moreover, the study is based on data from 2006, although the timeliness of the data may not be as great a concern as initially thought. Qatar recently released the findings of its WHO STEPwise approach to surveillance of non-communicable diseases (STEPS) 2012 survey, which showed comparably high if not even higher levels of risk factor exposure for non-communicable diseases [2], with reported prevalences of 41.4% for obesity, 16.7% for diabetes, and 32.9% for hypertension. While the results from the two studies are