Estimation of the Medico-Ecological Component of Life Quality at the Level of Risk of Morbidity with Mass Non-Infectious Diseases

For an objective assessment of the quality of life (QOL) in areas with different environmental pressures and the development of recommendations for improving medical care, population studies of children are used. The purpose of this study is to assess the risk of a general incidence of mass noncommunicable diseases (МND) of the child population of industrial cities with various environmental pressures as an indicator of QOL. To assess the anthropogenic load in industrial cities, atmospheric air pollution with harmful substances was analyzed. The assessment of the influence of local factors of cities was determined by relative and attributable risks of morbidity using synchronous annual and corresponding to the studied time interval values of background and estimated morbidity, and the influence of common background factors by the value of initial background morbidity at the beginning of the long-term observation period. To assess and rank changes in QOL in areas with different environmental loads, we used the results of the analysis of the long-term risk dynamics of the minority disease of children’s population with long-term exposure to a complex of general and local environmental factors of industrial cities of the Irkutsk region. To do this, we used the criteria developed by the authors for assessing the degree of tension of the medico-ecological situation and the strength of the impact of environmental factors on them by the relative risk levels of the minimum level and the corresponding QOL levels for the specified component. QOL in terms of the minimum number of children’s diseases in the period under review decreases as a whole due to the increasing influence of general background (regional) factors throughout the region, and in the studied cities in addition from the influence of local adverse factors, including anthropogenic pollution of atmospheric air. A significant decrease in the local anthropogenic load is accompanied by a decrease in the associated additional МND and the severity of the additional to the background decrease in QOL in the industrial cities of the region, especially in Angarsk.