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Scientific questions

As populations experience socioeconomic change their exposures to factors imparting health risks also change. This ‘risk transition' induces a ‘health transition' with marked shifts in patterns of survival and disease. Some transitions are beneficial, others not. In Thailand, where this transition process is underway, answers to the following questions would provide information needed to make these transitions as beneficial possible:-

• How has the Thai health transition progressed over the last 50 years?
  
• What is the population distribution, and the time course of changes (ie the ‘risk transition'), of proximal (‘downstream') health-risk factors (eg. working-living conditions, personal lifestyle and behaviours, health care use)?
  
• What are distal (‘upstream') influences on risk transitions, analysed at two levels – structural (eg. social stratification, occupation, wealth resource redistribution mechanisms) and systemic (eg. environment, human ecology, social system)
  
• How do the above risk distributions and transitions vary among sub-groups according to person, place and time (eg. young/old, rural/urban, rich/poor)
  
• How are the risks and disease patterns changing over time?
  
• How do individual risks relate to specific disease outcomes?
  
• What evidence-based interventions are needed and feasible in Thailand to substantially reduce avoidable emerging disease burdens?