Women’s health, correct lifestyles and prevention in the ASL3 project

In the Genoese metropolitan area, one in two women between sixty and seventy is ill and one in four suffers from more than one pathology, 30% of Genoese women suffer from overweight or obesity, 23% smoke and 20% are former smokers. The meeting with the ASL3 specialists which took place today at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa started from these “women’s health” numbers. “This event represents an increasingly stronger involvement of Asl3 in the territory – explains the director of Asl3 Luigi Carlo Bottaro – and we want to highlight that there is a new way of dealing with healthcare, which is not just dealing with the disease but preventing it by that correct lifestyles are not a temporary fad but become a change of life to prevent women from living as long a period as possible without illness”. “In our region women live about 5 years longer than men, 85 years compared to 80 – adds Gianni Testino, director of the correct lifestyle department of Asl3 – but they often get sick and after the age of sixty those who have two or more illnesses they are a significant number. This is why we work on prevention and health promotion programs through our department so that we live not only longer but better. This is why we need voluntary actions for our health which are nutrition, movement, the elimination of alcohol and smoking and correct use of social media.” Among the major problems are alcohol-related ones, for which yesterday the 2024 report by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità and ISTAT was released with 62.7% of women consuming alcohol, 23% consuming it between meals, is a 4, 3% who drink to get drunk, the so-called “binge drinking”, with the result that 11.6% of women, around 9 thousand, are at risk of developing alcohol-related diseases and 600 new cases of alcohol-related cancer per year (males and females) 150 are at the udder. “The work carried out in recent years has led to some positive results with a decrease in the number of women consuming alcohol – recalls Testino – and this means that the prevention campaigns have worked. But the problem is still very large: we think that in Liguria we have 90 thousand people who consume alcohol in a risky way.” (video report by Fabrizio Cerignale)