Health risk factors

Health risk factors like smoking, excessive drinking, illicit drug use, lack of physical activity, inadequate fruit and vegetable intake and overweight have powerful influences on health, and there are frequently clear inter-regional differences between the prevalence of these.  

While it can be argued that there is some degree of personal choice involved in whether individuals have a poor health risk profile, there is clear evidence that external factors such as environment, opportunity, and community culture each have very strong influences. For example, access to affordable healthy food can often be poor in smaller communities and this, coupled with lower incomes in these areas, adversely affects the quality of peoples’ diets, the prevalence of overweight, and consequently the prevalence of chronic disease.

National data pertaining to personal health risk factors typically comes from the ABS National Health Survey and the AIHW National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS). Some State and Territory Health Departments run their own health surveys (which cannot be aggregated nationally with each other or with the ABS survey because of the different methodologies and definitions used (think different State rail gauges). Consequently data describing aspects of health in regional and especially remote areas can be thin (ie with imprecise estimates in some or all areas).

At the time of writing, the most recent National Health Survey was conducted in 2014-15, while the most recent AIHW NDSHS was conducted in 2016, with most recently available results from the 2013 NDSHS. The most recent ABS Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey was conducted in 2012-13.  

Some organisations (eg the Public Health Information Development Unit (PHIDU)) have calculated modelled estimates for small areas (eg SLA’s and PHN’s), where the prevalence of some risk factors has been predicted based on the age, sex and socioeconomic profile of the population living there.

Some sites (eg ABS) present risk factor data as crude rates, other sites (eg PHIDU) present risk factor data as age-standardised rates.  The advantage of the age-standardised rates is that the effect of age is largely removed from inter-population comparisons.

For example, older populations (eg those in rural/regional areas) would be expected to have higher average blood pressure than younger (eg Major cities) populations even though the underlying age-specific rates happened to be identical in both populations (because older people tend to have higher blood pressure than younger people). While crude rates for the older population will be higher, the age-standardised rates in such a comparison would be the same – indicating a higher rate that is entirely explainable by the older age of one of the populations.   Both crude and age standardised rates are useful in understanding the health of rural and remote populations.

Women in rural and remote areas were much more likely to smoke during pregnancy, with 28% of women in remote areas smoking during pregnancy, compared with 18-19% in regional/rural areas, and 9% in Major cities.

It is unclear whether exposure to environmental tobacco smoke varies by remoteness.

Young people outside major cities appeared to have their first cigarette at an earlier age (15 years as opposed to 16 years in Major cities.

Secondary school students in Inner regional (23%) and remote (28%) areas were more likely to have had at least a few puffs of a cigarette than those in major cities (~18%).

While 20% of young people in Major cities had smoked more than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime, 26%, 44% and 45% of young people in Inner regional, Outer regional and remote areas had done so.

People outside Major cities were as likely or slightly more likely to have attempted to quit smoking, but were less likely to be successful (and more likely to be unsuccessful).

A higher proportion of secondary students outside Major cities were weekly or monthly smokers (6%, 5% and 7% in IR, OR and remote areas versus 5% in Major cities weekly, 9%, 7%, and 10% in IR, OR and remote areas versus 7% in Major cities monthly).

Prevalence of smoking amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people 15 years and older is around 35%-40% in Major cities and regional/rural areas, and close to 50% in remote areas. Note that while the pattern is similar in Table 2 and Table 3 above, the figures for 18+ and 15+ year olds are slightly different.