A Typological Study of Portuguese Mortality from Non-communicable Diseases

Abstract

The most common non-communicable diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer, are a problem in global and national growth. The World Health Organization considers it a priority to study the specific causes of these diseases for trend monitoring. The aim of this paper is to identify a hierarchy of clusters of Portuguese mortality by noncommunicable diseases using the agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis. The Euclidean distance with complete linkage and average linkage criteria are used. These methods identify six clusters with both criteria, indicating some order of disease severity in the way clusters joint together. Special attention should be given to diseases in the last two clusters, where the last one is formed by ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular diseases and larynx / trachea / bronchi and lung malignant tumor, all for males. In fact, these clustering results show that male gender seems to be a risk factor for at least two groups of the non-communicable diseases. Other suggested risk factors and / or pathophysiological mechanisms that in a direct or indirect way may enhance the common development of the pathologies found in the clusters arising from this study should also be an object of priority study.