Understanding Health, Disease, and Prevention Strategies
Understanding Health and Disease
Concept of Health
Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. The health status of individuals or societies is the result of a number of factors, including heredity, environment, behavior, and access to health systems.
Risk Factors
A risk to health is the probability of an event occurring that can cause illness or death. This is manifested in the existence of factors, called risk factors. A risk factor is any circumstance or detectable property of a person or group of people related to the probability of developing a disease.
Types of risk factors:
- Modifiable risk factors: These depend on people’s behavior.
- Non-modifiable risk factors: These include age, sex, or heredity.
Preventive Medicine and Public Health
Public health is the application of the scientific method to health problems, taking disease as its subject. Preventive medicine is a branch of medicine dealing with preventing the emergence or development of a disease in the individual or family, based on knowledge of medical science.
Levels of prevention:
- Primary prevention: Targeted assistance to minimize risk factors and later diseases.
- Secondary prevention: Aims to avoid the clinical manifestations of a disease through early detection.
- Tertiary prevention: Assistance designed to improve the clinical course of a disease and prevent its complications.
Concept of Disease and Classification
Illness is a physical or mental disorder that causes alterations in the functioning of the body. A pathology refers to changes occurring in the body because of the disease.
Classification of diseases:
- Non-infectious: These are not caused by pathogens. This group includes non-transmittable diseases such as injuries.
- Infectious: These are caused by pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, etc. They are one of the most frequent causes of human disease. Their growth in cells and tissues is called an infection.
Types of Diseases
Non-Infectious Diseases
Several types are distinguished:
- Hereditary: Inherited from parents. Many are chronic and remain for life.
- Mental diseases: Characterized by causing abnormal personality disorders.
- Specific diseases of organs and systems: Affecting different organs and body systems such as digestive, circulatory, respiratory, etc.
- Autoimmune diseases: Due to a failure of the immune system, resulting in the production of molecules that undermine the body, producing lesions in many systems.
- Diseases caused by accidents: Including diseases caused in traffic accidents, domestic accidents, etc.
Infectious Diseases
Prevalence is the number of people with a certain disease at a given time, while incidence is the number of new cases of a disease that occur in a population.
Among the characteristics of the pathogen in relation to the host are:
- Contagiousness: The organism’s capacity to spread.
- Infectivity: The ability of the infectious agent to settle and multiply.
- Pathogenicity: The ability of the pathogen to cause disease.
- Virulence: The degree of pathogenicity.
Reservoirs of Infection
Before infecting humans, all pathogens have places called reservoirs of infection where they breed or perpetuate and are transmitted from there to people.
Phases of Infectious Diseases
Three phases can be distinguished:
- Incubation period: The time elapsed since the entry of the pathogen to the onset of symptoms.
- Prodromal period: Characterized by the appearance of nonspecific general signs that are presented in a number of processes. The pathogen has not yet acted on the body where it will cause the disease.
- Clinical period: The onset of symptoms and signs that define the disease and, together with the analytical data, will allow the doctor to make an accurate diagnosis of the disease.