Diseases: Ethnic Groups
(asked on 6th September 2022) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the prevalence of (a) diabetes, (b) heart disease, (c) hypertension, (d) high cholesterol, (e) obesity, (f) cancer, (g) poor eye health and (h) mental illness levels among people from the South Asian community in England; and if he will make a statement.
‘Health Survey England Additional Analyses, Ethnicity and Health, 2011-2019 Experimental statistics’, published in June 2022, assesses the prevalence of commonly reported longstanding conditions, hypertension, diabetes and adult obesity. This data is available at the following link:
There are no recent estimates of raised cholesterol prevalence in South Asian ethnic groups in England. Data on the prevalence of child obesity by ethnic group are available from the National Child Measurement Programme. The latest data for 2021/21 show that prevalence of obesity in children aged four to five years old was below the national average for Indian children and above the national average for Bangladeshi and Pakistani children. In children aged 10 to 11 years old in 2021/20 prevalence of obesity was above the national average for Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani children.
Cancer prevalence counts the number of people living with and beyond a cancer diagnosis at a fixed point in time. Data from National Cancer Registration Dataset shows that in 2019, 47,761 people in the South Asian community were diagnosed with cancer between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2019 and were alive on 31 December 2019.
There is no national dataset that provides information on the prevalence of the main eye conditions. Estimates are derived from population modelling and information from the Certification of Vision Impairment (CVI) register. While the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities is assessing the ethnicity data collected as part of the CVI register, no analysis has yet been completed.
The Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey of 2014 provides prevalence estimates of some mental health conditions by broad ethnic group. The prevalence rates, taking account of age, in Asian/Asian British adults in England were 17.9% for common mental disorders; 5.8% screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder; 0.9% for psychotic disorder in the last year; and 1.4% screened positive for bi-polar disorder. For all conditions except bi-polar disorder, although the prevalence is higher in the Asian group than the White British group it is not possible to say whether this is a statistically significant difference.