Chronic Disease: Prevention, Intervention, Treatment and Care

Dear Colleagues,

Globally, the number of individuals with chronic conditions is growing. Chronic diseases have negatively affected many health outcomes, including patient-reported outcomes and healthcare costs.  One strategy for improving the outcomes of patients with chronic conditions is enhancing their self-care. However, performing adequate self-care is challenging to individuals with chronic diseases because self‐care involves day‐to‐day decision-making related to chronic condition management by an individual with and without help from their caregiver(s). Many investigators have found barriers to and facilitators of self-care in a variety of chronic conditions, yet focused on an index condition. However, these findings might not reflect the reality of patients with chronic illnesses because a majority of patients experience more than one chronic condition. With the presence of multi-morbid conditions, the decision-making process related to self-care can be more complex, and the simultaneous demands from multiple medical conditions can be overwhelming to patients.  Therefore, we need to understand the complexity of the self-care process in patients with multiple conditions and develop interventions considering this complexity. This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) invites papers addressing these topics, including those with new approaches to developing interventions that target the enhancement of self-care in patients with multiple comorbidities.

 

Dr. Kyoung Suk Lee
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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