ATTITUDES AND ISCHEMIC-HEART-DISEASE IN THE CAERPHILLY STUDY - THE HEALTH ATTITUDE INVENTORY

Background. The Health Attitude Inventory (HAI) is developed to assess attitudes, beliefs and values towards coronary-related behaviour in e pidemiological studies. It comprises a 76-item self-administered quest ionnaire which can be completed in under 10 minutes by most adults. Me thods The HAI was administered to 2100 men aged 50-64 years along with measures of ischaemic heart disease risk factors, including the follo wing coronary-related behaviours: smoking, exercise, type A behaviour and the consumption of fried food, dairy produce, wholemeal bread and vegetables, Results. Cross-sectional analyses using linear regression showed attitudes, beliefs and Values to explain between 8% and 27% of the variance in the dietary coronary-related behaviour. For exercise 1 3% of the variance was explained, and for type A behaviour 18%. Simila r analysis for smoking using logistic regression (non-smoker versus cu rrent smoker) showed a predictive concordance of 95%. Conclusions. The HAI has demonstrated the assessment of attitudes, beliefs and values in an epidemiological setting to show associations with a range of cor onary risk behaviours. This finding has potential public health as wel l as aetiological application in that influential attitudes, values an d beliefs can be identified to aid increasing healthy as well as reduc ing risky coronary-related behaviour.