Correlations among the Number of Inpatients in Obesity, Diabetes, Hypertension, and Heart Diseases

Abstract

Obesity occurs when there is an excess amount of body fat and may cause diseases and other health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart diseases. In a correlation study using time series data on the number of inpatients in four diseases from Thailand's inpatient statistics, the summary of illness reports from the Ministry of Public Health since 2021 dated back to 2012 for 10 years. When analyzed using Spearman’s rank correlation, the number of inpatients in obesity was related to the number of inpatients in diabetes. and the number of inpatients with high blood pressure with statistical significance equal to 0.964 (p-value < .001) and 0.952 (p-value < .001), respectively. The number of inpatients in diabetes and the number of inpatients in hypertension had a statistically significant Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.998 (p-value < .001).As for the number of inpatients in heart diseases and the number of inpatients in obesity, the number of inpatients in diabetes, and the number of inpatients in hypertension, there was no statistically significant correlation; the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients were -0.442 (p-value = 0.204), -0.370 (p-value = 0.296), and -0.394 (p-value = 0.263), respectively. The number of inpatients in obesity was highly related with the number of inpatients in diabetes and the number of inpatients in hypertension.