Application of Discrete-time, Right Censored Survival and Unbalanced Three-stage Hierarchical Designs in Modeling Chronic Diseases among the University Students of Kenya

The percentage of university students currently nursing chronic diseases including but not limited to depression, HIV/AIDs, asthma, stroke and chronic kidney diseases, is alarming, and for a long time, these students are ever thought to be healthy. However, research shows otherwise with up to 30% of the students nursing the diseases. Previous research worldwide shows that up to 30% of university students can be infected at a given time. This research aimed to investigate the issues concerning chronic diseases among university students in Kenya. The specific objectives included estimation of the percentage of students currently suffering from the diseases, determining their effects and factors associated with them. The mixed-study design was applied. Random sampling was done among students in two selected universities in Kenya and a questionnaire was used in data collection. 739 students responded to the research questions. Minitab, SPSS and R software were involved in data management for comparison purpose, especially for statistically significant results. From the analysis, currently, there are approximately 14.6% of the students are suffering from chronic diseases, and this proportion is significant (p-value<0.0001). Among the infected, 60.19% were females and the rest were males. Among the sick, only 43.52% have let the university clinics know about their conditions while more than 50% have concealed the vital information. The factors ‘family history’, ‘involvement in drugs’, ‘adopted life-styles’ and ‘extreme poverty’ were found to be significantly associated with chronic diseases among the students. On the effects, the diseases were found to be negatively affecting the aspects of life of the infected students. Survival of the students was found to be having a mean and median survival time of 29.9472 and 30.27 years respectively. It is concluded that there is need for intervention among university students as 14.6% is not a number to be ignored. It is recommended that the stakeholders to come together and arrest the situation before things slip out of hand.