Self-Management Interventions among Asian Persons with Chronic Disease: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics defined disease to be chronic when lasting three months or more. Chronic disease generally cannot be prevented by vaccines, or cured by medications,nor do they just disappear. With the increasing incidence of chronic disease, self-management is seen to be one of the techniques used to appropriately address the problem. It is important to acquire skills and knowledge to achieve goals for better quality of life. The aim of this paper is to identify the major diseases of chronically-ill patients and to determine the self-management interventions adopted by patients diagnosed with a chronic disease. The researcher utilized systematic integrative literature review using content analysis technique. Due to diverse potential findings, the review utilized a certain degree of limitations as criteria for selection. A multi-staging strategy was developed to identify the significant and relevant review literatures. Key words such self-management, chronic disease; interventions were used to retrieve significant literatures. PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane library and Thai databases were utilized for literature retrieval.The literatures are published from June 2006 to December 2012 and were published internationally. A total of 14 literatures systematically reviewed based from the research intentions. Findings revealed that the
common chronic diseases among Asians include diabetes mellitus, chronic heart diseases, arthritis,sedentary-acquired problems like obesity and hypertension. The review also identified self-management interventions such as increase of active exercises, improvement of dietary control to sodium intake, takin medications religiously as prescribed, weight monitoring, cognitive improvement and counseling, improved self-care and behavioral changes. It is recommended that further studies be made to identify more independent actions to improve intervention program for an improved outcome to patients with chronic diseases.