What is the project about?
HITT-CIS investigates long-term trends of population health with a focus on lifestyle related issues.
Main fields of this project are:
- Long-term trends in population health in CIS countries
- Diet and nutrition patters in CIS countries
- Consumption of Alcohol and Tobacco in CIS countries and official policies with this tregard
- Access to health care
- Investigation into the social and economic burden of disease
- Identification of strategies to improve population health
- Living conditions, Lifestyles and health in CIS countries
- Public policies in CIS countries
Understanding population health means to account for factors acting at many levels, the individual level and the level of the public domain within which individuals live.
- Population health is influenced by the pattern of disease
- The onset of disease is influenced by the pattern of exposure to risk factors (such as diet and smoking)
- Exposure to risk factors is influenced by a variety of distal factors, including socio-economic status, education, geographical and economic access to resources, psycho-social characteristics and social capital
All of these factors are inter-related and thus there is clustering of deprivation with poverty associated with smoking and poor diet as well as reduced access to effective care. These factors are also dynamic, changing over time.
One of the major innovations of this study is that, for the first time, it seeks to assess explicitly these public domains and relate them to health, looking at how social and economic policies, health systems, and health promotion activities (such as bans on tobacco advertising) impact on the lives of individuals.
Project facts
- Primarily funded by EU – FP7, 2009-2013
- in-depth research in 10 CIS countries
- Interdisciplinary partnership of Public Health research, Sociology, Political science
- 13 international project partners from European Union, Canada, CIS
- Series of large-scale cross-national Quantitative and Qualitative sociological surveys
- Statistical and economic investigations and case studies, policy analysis
- capacity building through training of researchers
- wide disseminations of project outcomes and policy briefs
- close cooperation with WHO (World Health Organization)
The study focuses on 10 countries in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) region and identifies strategies to implement effective solutions to improve population health.
| # | Country | Population (est. 2008) | |
| 1 |  |
Russia | 142,008,838 |
| 2 |  |
Belarus | 9,689,800 |
| 3 |  |
Ukraine | 46,179,226 |
| 4 |  |
Moldova | 4,128,047 |
| 5 |  |
Kazakhstan | 16,402,861 |
| 6 |  |
Uzbekistan | 27,727,435 |
| 7 |  |
Kyrgyzstan | 5,356,869 |
| 8 |  |
Armenia | 3,231,900 |
| 9 |  |
Azerbaijan | 8,238,672 |
| 10 |  |
Georgia | 4,730,841 |
