Gendered Prevalence of Non-Communicable Diseases in India’s Older Adults

Introduction The World Health Organization (WHO) defines non-communicable diseases (NCDs), or chronic diseases, as illnesses of long duration and the product of a combination of genetic, physiological, environmental, and behavioural factors. [1] The major types of NCDs are cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes. This paper focuses on the NCDs burden of India’s older adult women, which is a result of multiple factors, including what experts refer to as “social determinants of health”. These are “the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.” [2] They can include income and social protection, education, unemployment and job insecurity, housing, basic amenities, and the environment. Women’s health has been historically under-prioritised and under-funded, especially beyond reproductive and maternal health. Later in their life, women bear an uneven and disproportionate share of the elderly illiterate, financially uninsured, and progressively diseased population. This phenomenon can be partly explained by the impact of social biases and gendered roles. For example, older adult women bear a disproportionate amount of unpaid care work (245 minutes a day for elderly women; 112 minutes for elderly men); they are often segregated in poorly paid labour-intensive work; and they have poor access to digital tools and technology. They also face the risk of gender-based violence. Nutritional deficiencies and morbidities like anaemia (5.9 percent women compared to 3.1 percent men) and obesity (10.2 percent of women compared to 3.4 percent of men) further exacerbate with age.