Prevalence of Chronic Diseases in Middle-Aged Women

Background: during middle age, a lot of changes happen in all physical, mental, social, and family aspects of women that may greatly affect the development of diseases and mortality risk..objectives: this research was conducted to determine the extent of chronic diseases in middle-aged women visiting healthcare treatment centers in ahvaz..materials and methods: this was a descriptive research study carried on 1266 women of 45-64 years old who were selected using the multistage sampling method. the necessary information was collected through a self-designed questionnaire and analyzed using spss v21. descriptive statistics, t test, and analysis of variance (anova) was performed at 95% level of confidence..results: results showed that 46.8% of these women had one or more chronic diseases as follows: hypertension 12.5%, diabetes mellitus 7.5%, diabetes mellitus with heart diseases or high blood pressure 8.8%, heart diseases 5.8%, heart diseases together with high blood pressure 3.5%, and other diseases 8.7%. the effect of age, number of children, death of husband, occupation, ability to look after oneself, and do housework independently, degree of education, economic status (p < 0.001), age at marriage, and ethnicity (p = 0.001), on chronic diseases were significant..conclusions: considering our results and high prevalence of chronic diseases, especially high blood pressure and diabetes mellitus, in middle-aged women, greater attention must be paid to the screening and monitoring programs of these chronic diseases..