Week 5- Psychology of the Health Behaviours Flashcards
Smoking and physical health link
- The longer you smoked the more at risk you were for Peripheral Artery Disease (Atherosclerosis) e.g. people who smoked for over 25 years were 4x likely to get PAD
- Same basic trends for Coronary heart disease and stoke although trends of various gradients (see graphs)
- Elevated risk after smoking cessation prolonged most for peripheral artery disease (i.e. risk takes the longest to return to baseline).
- Encouraging evidence = Those who only stopped smoking 5 years ago have a risk of stroke that has return to baseline (i.e. equal to never having smoked)
Smoking and mental health outcomes
- Higher rates of smoking among people with mental health conditions
- High smoking rates (almost 60%) in schizophrenics —> could be a number of possible explanations for this
e.g. Nicotine improve psychiatric symptoms i.e. using cigarettes to self-medicate and improve cognitive function (e.g. memory) If you take a functional perspective = nicotine helping them? Although could be safer ways then self-medicating with smoking —> smoking substitution programs targeted at those with schizophrenia
e.g. Severe childhood abuse contributing to cause of illness and smoking use (childhood instability, major stressors) –> environmental pathway
e.g. Genetic pathways (predispose to smoking and mental health issue)
Drinking and the alcohol -attributable fraction
- The alcohol-attributable fraction denotes the proportion of health outcomes which is caused by alcohol (i.e. the proportion which would disappear If alcohol consumption was removed). Alcohol consumption has a casual impact on more than 200 health conditions (diseases and injuries)
- Countries where highest rate of Alcohol-attributable fraction of mortality in 2012 were Russia and Venezuela
- Some argue communism linked (turn to alcohol to cope with chronic stress, disillusion etc.)
Drinking and physical health link
- Effect of drinking on physical health is varied (brain, heart, stomach, liver, reproductive system)
- No amount of drinking is safe (although conflicting information on this e.g. red wine sometimes said to benefits).
Drinking and mental health link
- Wenicke-koraskoff syndrome (more detail in later card)
- What direction is the link between drinking and mental health
i.e. mental health problems —> moderate drinking. Moderate drinking—> mental health problems. Or do they both effect the other (bidirectional) - Whitehall II prospective cohort study looked into this and found only a significant relationship for mental health problems prospectively predicting alcohol consumption i.e. poor mental health comes first!
- PSYC490 dissertation student Jenna Gawn:
- The role of drinking in impairing next day mental health
- Daily diary entry = asked about experiences that day (focused on the flourishing aspect of wellbeing e.g. feelings of engagement, meaning, purpose, etc.) + how much alcohol did you drink the night before?
- Categorise everyone in sample based on drinking night before: No drinking
, Low risk (1-4 drinks for women, 1-5 drinks for men), Medium risk (5-9 drinks for women and 6-11 drinks for men), High risk drinking (10+drinks for women and 12+ drinks for men) - Findings= Low risk drinking had no impact on wellbeing but as progress up categories reductions in wellbeing were profound.
Critiques of the Jenna Gawn study linking drinking to next day mental health
- Relying on self-report (may not be most reliable)
- Expectancy effect? –> although question embedded in lot of other different
-Grouping but how clear is cutoff = maybe more beneficial to plot each drink
-Reverse = drinking to cope with low wellbeing instead of other way around
Exercise and Mental Health link
-Exercise has emotional benefits (less depression; also less stress and anxiety due to increase in ‘calming’ neurotransmitter GABA, which decreases stress reactivity).
- Exercise has cognitive benefits (improved sleep, synaptic plasticity, neuronal growth – e.g., brain derived neurotrophic factor BDNF)
- Pattern between exercise and mental benefits: 5000 steps and 15000 steps a day have the same benefits for mental health associated with them. This suggests that increasing benefit of exercise to mental health is only up to a certain point before levelling off i.e. another non-linear relationship.
Exercise and Physical Health link
- Exercise has health benefits (reduced mortality, better cardiovascular health).
- Pattern between exercise and physical benefits:
Physical benefits of exercise are not linear . No exercise to a little exercise = a huge improvement in health i.e. –> reduced mortality. But once exercising at about 10 hours a week benefits to mortality level off. Recommended amount of exercise is half way through the slope which suggests maybe should be doubled to be equal with level off point i.e. when increases to exercise are having no added benefit in terms of reduced mortality.
Diet and physical health link
- Link between healthy diet e.g. fruit and vegetable and physical health (expected)
- In all of the different studies in meta-analysis the risk of dying was lower with increased fruits and vegetable intake
- Reduction in mortality is with 1 additional serving –> effect multiples for more servings on top of this.
Magic number = 5 after this amount of servings effect of fruit and vegetable intake on mortality rate levels off (why 5 servings is the recommendation).
Diet and Mental Health link
- Prospective relationship between Fruit and Vege intake and mental health was shown with the use of the Mediterranean diet
- Non-linear pattern to this relationship with moderate adherence (not strict adherence) producing the best health outcomes.
- This non-linear relationship as also shown for a vegetarian diet
Potential for both of these trends to be explained by hyperfocus in diet culture leading to harmful restriction in food intake?
Mediterranean diet & Depression Risk
- Sun Cohort Study in Spain
- 10,094 adults who were not initially depressed
- University graduate age
-Mediterranean diet intake especially of fruit & nuts, legumes, types of fat
- Incidence of depression assessed 4.4 years later
See the lowest depression risk for high adherence group
-Interesting one group above this = very high adherence and they did not have the lowest risk of depression —> indicative of harmful diet culture i.e. strict adherence is not always the best
Processed diet & Depression Risk (Akbaraly T er al. (2009)
-Processed diet tertiles: sweetened desserts, fried food, processed meat, refined grains & high fat dairy products
- Striking: the prospective link between processed food intake & the risk of subsequent depression 5 years later
- Adjusted for age, gender, marital status, SES, physical activity, smoking, and CVD, hypertension, and diabetes.
- Linear relationship = the higher the processed food intake was the worse the 5 year depression risk with step wise reductions for both medium and low processed food diet groups.
What does the WHO atlas of smoking show in terms of countries with more smoking?
Smoking in general is decreasing across all countries but is not equally distributed throughout the world. There is also gender differences in the level of smoking
For men some countries with a 60% and above smoking rate are:
- Russia
- China
- Mongolia
- Parts of Africa
For Woman there is zero countries with a 60% and above smoking rate. On the whole woman tend to smoke a lot less with the only countries where men and woman smoke of equal amounts being Norway and Sweden and interestingly New Zealand!
Note: Data from about 10 years ago.
NZ trends for smoking
- Smoking rates decreasing overall across all ethnicities
- Although discrepancies between ethnicities still remain e.g. Maori (19.9%) and pacific (18.2%) tend to smoke more than European/ other (16.4%)
-SES predicts smoking after adjusting for gender, age, and ethnic differences. Adults living in the most socioeconomically deprived areas are 3 times as likely as adults in the least deprived areas to be smokers.
Why might the SES health gradient be so clear for smoking?
- Chronic stress
-Paternal model
-Lower education
-Alienation
-Exposure to nicotine in utero/ early in life
