Associations of Non-attendance Behavior in Health Examination and Awareness of Health Checkups and Health Guidance and Sociodemographic Factors among the Age 40 to 59 -Comparing with Self-employments and Office Workers-

Abstract

    Health Checkups and Health Guidance (HCHG) have been provided to insured individuals between the ages of 40 to 74 by health insurance providers from 2008. However, attendance percentage has not reached the target value yet. The purpose of this study was to determine the factors associated with those who do not attend Health Checkups and the relation between non-attendance behavior and awareness of HCHG and metabolic syndrome, sociodemographics, regular exercise, and body composition in office workers or the self-employed. The 424 respondents were above the age of 40 (male : n=331, female : n=93, 49.1±5.6 years) and were obtained from the registrants of a Japanese social research company. The web-based questionnaire survey was conducted in February 2009. The study design was a cross-sectional survey using an internet questionnaire. χ² analysis was utilized. As a result of this study, non- attendance behavior was shown to be significantly correlated with the office workers whose house- income is under 5,000,000 yen (χ² [4] =20.30, p<0.001) . For the self-employed, significant relations were found for men who do not attend Health Checkups (χ² [2] =3.83, p<0.05) and people who don’ t aware HCHG (χ² [2] =4.29, p<0.05) . This study shows that many self-employed men do not attend Health Checkups. Also, it suggests that this problem may have some relation with the awareness HCHG and attendance behavior. This further suggests that we need to consider promotion strategies for attendance behavior according to such factors as respondent’ s gender and occupation.