Chronic Disease and Mental Health Prevalence Among Migrants in Central Asia

Background and Purpose

Globally, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) or chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer contribute the greatest portion of the global burden of disease. Increasingly, mental health conditions like depression are growing in prevalence and impacting vulnerable populations. Although, some studies have found that migration to be associated with a number of health risks such as HIV/AIDS recent literature has shown that the ‘healthy immigrant effect’ is most notably common when considering the low incidence of chronic diseases among migrant populations. In countries like Kazakhstan, which has high rates of labor migrants, there is limited data on the prevalence of chronic diseases and mental health among migrants. This study examined the prevalence of chronic diseases and mental health among migrants in Kazakhstan.

Methods

Using respondent driven sampling (RDS), data was collected on 623 migrants in Kazakhstan from neighboring countries, e.g. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and focused on the multilevel risk factors associated with tuberculosis among the sample.  Additional information on risk factors such as chronic disease and mental health history were collected through self-reported data.

Results

In the study, overwhelming majority of labor migrants reported having no history of chronic diseases. Ninety-eight percent of the participants reported no history of heart disease, while all participants (100%) reported no history of diabetes or cancer. Conversely, 99.5% of the respondents reported having no history of a clinical diagnosis of depression or another psychiatric condition. Descriptive statistics showed that 60% of the migrants were from Uzbekistan with 23% and 17% coming from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, respectively. More than 78% of the participants were male.

Conclusions and Implications

Study findings show that the ‘healthy immigrant effect’ is applicable to labor migrants from Central Asia in that the burden of chronic diseases and mental health conditions was non-existent in this group. The findings underscore the need to further study whether chronic diseases and mental health conditions are indeed less likely among migrant population as posited by the ‘healthy immigrant effect’ theory, especially as the prevalence of non-communicable diseases continue to increase worldwide.