Press Release

Findings of Population Health Survey released

14 November 2005

The majority of people in Hong Kong considered themselves healthy, but in fact about 40 per cent of the population were overweight.

These are some of the findings of Population Health Survey (PHS), the first large scale territory-wide survey on the health status of people in Hong Kong.

The PHS was jointly conducted by the Department of Health (DH) and the University of Hong Kong's Department of Community Medicines in 2003/04.

Presenting the findings at a press conference today (November 14), Dr Tse Lai-yin, Consultant (Community Medicine) of DH said about 60 per cent of the Hong Kong people rated their health as good or even excellent and 42 per cent of them considered they had a good quality of life.

"But on the other hand, about 40 per cent of the people in Hong Kong could be categorized as overweight or obese," she said.

Dr Tse urged members of the public to adopt healthy lifestyle because many chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension are associated with behavioural risk factors including a lack of physical activity, smoking and imbalanced diet.

During the survey, a total of 7 084 land-based non-institutional people aged 15 and above (representing 5.68 million persons after applying population weights) were interviewed and the response rate was 72 per cent.

The findings of the PHS would be used to strengthen the information base on population health status for formulating health policy.

Also present at the briefing was Professor Lam Tai-hing, Chair Professor and Head of HKU's Department of Community Medicine. He said as for acute health problems, the three most frequently reported diseases among the interviewees in the month prior to the survey were common cold or upper respiratory infections (35.3%), low back pain (27.3%) and joint pain (21.3%).

Among the major chronic diseases, hypertension (12.1%), high blood cholesterol (8.4%) and diabetes (3.8%) were mostly found in the respondents.

"The prevalence of these diseases increased with increasing age and field measurement of blood pressure revealed that another 15 per cent of the interviewees were found to have hypertension," Professor Lam said.

In terms of mental health status, the percentages of people having doctor-diagnosed anxiety disorder and depression were 2 and 1.5 respectively.

Regarding health risk behaviours and health related lifestyle practices, Professor Lam noted that one in four of the interviewees had ever smoked cigarette and 14.7 per cent were daily smokers.

"Furthermore, 9.5 per cent of the interviewees were regular alcohol users (drinking at least once a week) and only 16.3 per cent of the interviewees reported taking five or more servings of fruits or vegetables daily," he added.

The PHS also revealed that 31.8 per cent of the people were physically inactive.

"In terms of age, people aged 15-24 and people aged 75 and above had the highest and lowest proportions of people being classified as highly active respectively," he said.

Noting that 21.5 per cent of the respondents had done something to control weight in the 12 months preceding the survey, Professor Lam said the majority of them chose to do exercise and eat less food as weight-control measures.

As for preventive health practices, about one-fifth of the population reported that they had regular physical check-up.

"There were more females than males who had regular physical check-up (28.1 per cent in females versus 17.3 per cent in males)," Professor Lam said.

It is also noted that over 50 per cent of the interviewees were doing or planning to do something in the month after the survey to promote their health or prevent disease.

"In order to monitor the changes of the health status of the local population, we plan to conduct survey of this type every five years," Dr Tse said.

Given the ageing population and changing risk profile of the population, Dr Tse Lai-yin stated that the Government would join hands with other sectors of the community to develop public health strategies to combat the challenges of chronic diseases.

Members of the public can obtain more information on the PHS report which has been uploaded to the DH webpage (http://www.dh.gov.hk) and the Centre for Health Protection webpage (http://www.chp.gov.hk).