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Relation between travel and self-rated health

Background

Generally, travel style of Japanese has tendency to have too much foods and alcohol and to visit too many sites in a short time, resulting to spend too much money. It may be caused by difficulty to have a long vacation due to long working time and this kind of travel doesn't always seem to be good for health. On the other side, several reports showed self-rated health could be related to future health condition cooperated with objective data for health such as blood pressure and serum cholesterol level. The purpose of this study is to examine the correlation between travel style and self-rated health.

Materials and methods

A questionnaire survey concerned with travel and health was conducted with 4,000 individuals among 18 years and over on October 2004.

Self-rated health were evaluated using four-point scale from "excellent" to "very poor", and type of travel in past one year was questioned, as well.

The distribution of self-rated health were rated in terms of dependent variables and odds ratios and their 95% confidence intervals were calculated using unconditional logistic models.

Results

Recreation trip regardless of whether it is over-night (Odds ratio = 1.28, 95% CI, 1.02–1.60) or one-day trip (Odds ratio = 1.49, 95% CI, 1.19–1.87) was highly related to self-rated health status in all generation, not depending on gender. However, "group tour", "homecoming trip" and "business trip" were not related to self-rated health. Among various types of recreation trips, "trip to enjoy sports" and "trip to enjoy nature" showed high Odds ratio.

Discussion

These findings suggest that having a personal recreation trip regardless of purpose and term might contribute to health promotion. Especially sports or outdoor activity might be good as a recreation for health.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Goto, Y., Nakamura, Y. Relation between travel and self-rated health. Ann Gen Psychiatry 5 (Suppl 1), S86 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-5-S1-S86

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-5-S1-S86

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