According to data from the National Health Survey, carried out between September 2019 and January 2020, released today by the Regional Directorate of Statistics of Madeira, depression as a chronic disease maintained the proportion of 10.4% in the population aged 15 or more years, as found in the last survey, in 2014.
This means that 22,900 people living in the Region suffer from this disease in a chronic form. In this context, the female gender continues to be the most affected by this disease (14.2% of the female population aged 15 or more).
According to the results obtained for the Region, the chronic diseases most frequently reported by the population aged 15 or over were low back pain or other chronic back problems (31.8%), high blood pressure (28.7%) and allergies (23.0%), with arterial hypertension having the greatest increase compared to 2014 (+6.0 percentage points – pp). This trend is identical to that seen in the country.
Also, know that more than half of the population aged 18 or more, more precisely 55.0%, was overweight or obese, although there was a reduction of 1.6 percentage points in relation to 2014, a trend opposite to the national one. Of that total, 38.2% were overweight and 16.8% were obese.