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Despite increasing mortality rates from cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) in low- and middle-income countries, information on the estimation of 10-year CVD risk remains to be sparse. Therefore, this study was aimed at predicting the 10-year CVD risk among community dwellers in Malaysia and at identifying the association of distal (socioeconomic characteristics) and proximal (lifestyle practices) factors with 10-year CVD risk. We calculated the 10-year CVD risk score among 11,897 eligible respondents from the community health survey conducted by the South East Asia Community Observatory (SEACO) using the Framingham risk score (FRS). The findings indicate that 28% of respondents have a high chance of having CVD within the next ten years. After adjusting for the age of respondents, demographic and socioeconomic factors such as gender, ethnicity, marital status, education, income, and occupation had an association with the 10-year CVD risk. In addition, frequent eating out had an association with 10-year CVD risk, while physical activity was found to have no association with predicted CVD risk. CVD remained among the top five mortality causes in Malaysia. Health promotion strategies should emphasize the importance of having home-cooked meals as a healthy dietary behavior, to reduce the mortality rate among Malaysians due to CVDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite various efforts introduced, private health insurance coverage is still low in Malaysia. The objective of this article is to find the factors associated with not having a private health insurance in Malaysia. We analyze data involving 19 959 respondents from the 2015 National Health Morbidity Survey. In this article, we describe the prevalence of not having health insurance and conducted binary logistic regression to identify determinants of uninsured status. A total of 56.6% of the study population was uninsured. After adjusting for other variables, the likelihood of being uninsured was higher among those aged 50 years and above, females, Malay/other Bumiputra ethnicities, rural, government/semigovernment, self-employed, unpaid workers and retirees, unemployed, lower education level, without home ownership and single/widowed/divorced, daily smoker, underweight body mass index, and current drinker. The likelihood of being uninsured also increased with increasing household size while the inversed trend was seen for household income. A substantial proportion of population in Malaysia did not have private health insurance, and these subgroups have limited preferential choices for provider, facility, and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]