JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the significance of adopting healthy lifestyles to mitigate the risk of severe outcomes and long-term consequences.

Objective:

This study focuses on assessing the prevalence and clustering of five unhealthy lifestyle behaviors among Vietnamese adults after recovering from COVID-19, with a specific emphasis on sex differences.

Methods:

We analyzed the cross-sectional data of 5,890 post-COVID-19 infected adults in Vietnam, from December 2021 to October 2022. To examine the gender differences in five unhealthy lifestyle behaviors (smoking, drinking, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, sedentary behavior), we plotted the percentages along with their corresponding 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) for each behavior. Latent class analysis was employed to identify two distinct classes of individuals based on the clustering of these behaviors: the less-unhealthy group and the more-unhealthy group. We examined the socio-demographic characteristics associated with each identified class and utilized logistic regression to investigate the factors related to belonging to the more-unhealthy group.

Results:

The majority of participants (99.4% males, 99.1% females) exhibited at least one unhealthy behavior, with males being more susceptible to multiple unhealthy behaviors. The male-to-female ratio for having a single behavior was 1.003, but it escalated to 25 for individuals displaying all five behaviors. Males demonstrated a higher prevalence of combining alcohol intake with sedentary behavior (38.8%) or an unhealthy diet (35.2%), whereas females tended to exhibit physical inactivity combined with sedentary behavior (37.9%) or an unhealthy diet (36.6%). Married male participants had increased odds of falling into the "more-unhealthy" group compared to their single counterparts (OR: 1.45, 95%CI: 1.14-1.85), while female participants exhibited lower odds (OR: 0.65, 95%CI: 0.51-0.83). Underweight females showed a higher likelihood of belonging to the "more-unhealthy" group (OR: 1.11, 95%CI: 0.89-1.39), but this was not observed among male participants (OR: 0.6, 95%CI: 0.41-0.89). In both genders, older age, dependent employment, high education, and obesity were associated with higher odds of being in the "more-unhealthy" group.

Conclusions:

The study identified notable gender differences in unhealthy lifestyle behaviors among COVID-19 survivors. Male survivors are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors compared to females. These findings emphasize the importance of tailored public health interventions targeting gender-specific unhealthy behaviors. Specifically, addressing unhealthy habits is crucial for promoting post-COVID-19 health and well-being.