Thus, stress, anxiety, and pain decrease happiness. This is the circle where one who is affected by a chronic illness lives but again it differs from person to person.
Many people get easily caught up in the vicious cycle of stress despite having the will and chance to live out of it.
Chronic illness, for some, is an opportunity to bring out the best in them, in terms of fighting back their illness with more immunity power, maturing oneself at least beyond four years in the process of dealing with the constant illness and pain that accompanies a chronic ailment.
Learning to appreciate the little things in one’s life, developing many exciting new hobbies if away from one’s vocation, opening new doors in every walk of life despite the closing of existing doors, preparing to change and direct one’s life for the better and not allowing the illness to haunt them for life, etc.
Nevertheless, with or without a chronic ailment, stress is a bane to one’s existence and one should discover or know certain things that need to be kept in mind in order to put stress under check and reduce their stress levels caused due to the haunting chronic pain cum illness.
But right away, it is important to know what is a chronic health problem and ten ways to be happier even when a chronic health issue surfaces in one’s life.
What Is A Chronic Health Problem?
A chronic condition is nothing but a human health condition or disease which is persistent or in other words a disease that’s long-lasting in its end results which come with time. It is a fact that the phrase ‘chronic’ is applied to a specific disease only when its duration persists for more than three months. Regular chronic diseases which are included as per the definition of the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics are cancer, arthritis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes and some viral diseases like hepatitis C and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
Likewise, an illness which is lifelong resulting in death as a consequence is a terminal illness. In medicine, a chronic condition can be differentiated from the one that is acute.
The non-communicable diseases are very much the lasting medical conditions that are distinguished owing to their non-infectious causes. In contrast, though some chronic diseases, like HIV/AIDS, are caused by transmissible infections.
As per the health statistics of the United States, 25% of adults have a minimum of two chronic conditions while the chronic diseases constitute a major cause of mortality, and the World Health Organization (WHO) attributes 38 million deaths a year to non-communicable diseases.
When it comes to describing chronic diseases, a doctor might use the words “controlled” or “stable” to describe one’s cancer if it’s unchanged over time.
The chronic disease can even go through the cycles of growing, shrinking, and staying the same sans any change.
Chronic diseases will prevail to be more common with age. Old age factor too plays a big role in deciding the kind of chronic diseases that can affect an individual.
The leading chronic diseases in developed countries include arthritis, cardiovascular diseases like heart attacks and stroke, cancer such as breast and colon cancer, diabetes, epilepsy and seizures, obesity, and oral health problems. Each of these conditions afflicts older adults in the United States.
For instance, cardiovascular disease is one among the growing concerns of the chronic ailments in the US with heart disease becoming the nation’s leading cause of death owing to the three health-related behaviors such as tobacco use, lack of physical activity, and poor nutrition which contribute markedly towards heart disease.
Heart disease is followed by cancer, obesity, arthritis, diabetes, oral health issues, epilepsy, etc among other major chronic health issues affecting the US population.
Types Of Chronic Health Issues
Chronic conditions have often been cited to discuss the various health-related states of the human body like physical impairments, syndromes, disabilities as well as diseases. Epidemiologists have taken stakes in chronic conditions due to the fact they contribute to disease, disability, and diminished physical and/or mental capacity. For example, hypertension or high blood pressure is considered to be not just a chronic condition in itself but also correlated to diseases like a heart attack or stroke. Additionally, some socio-economic factors may be rounded off as a chronic condition as they lead to disability in daily life.:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-175178519-59ecd56822fa3a00119d05ab.jpg "Chronic Health Issues")
In 2015, the World Health Organisation listed a report on non-communicable diseases, citing the four major types in the list below which includes the following chronic conditions and diseases:
- Cancers,
- Cardiovascular diseases like heart failure, cerebrovascular disease, and ischemic cardiopathy,
- Chronic respiratory conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and asthma, and
- Diabetes mellitus.
- Addiction
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Attention deficit hyperactivity dysfunction
- Autoimmune diseases, such as ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, coeliac disease, lupus erythematosus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and deteriorating polychondritis
- Bipolar disorder
- Blindness
- Cerebral palsy (all types)
- Chronic hepatitis
- Chronic kidney disease
- Chronic osteoarticular diseases, like osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis
- Chronic pain syndromes viz., post-vasectomy pain syndrome and complex regional pain syndrome
- Depression
- Deafness and hearing impairment
- Eating disorders
- Endometriosis
- Epilepsy
- Fibromyalgia
- HIV/AIDS
- Hypertension
- Multiple sclerosis
- Narcolepsy
- Obesity
- Osteoporosis
- Parkinson’s disease
- Periodontal disease
- Sickle cell anemia and other hemoglobin disorders
- Sleep apnea
- Thyroid disease
- Tobacco Use and Related Conditions.
