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Received Jul 4, 2017; Accepted Sep 7, 2017
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1. Introduction
In the modern world, population welfare is a major health factor. Although health is highly dependent on an efficient healthcare system, relevant empowerment of the population to meet complex health-related demands is especially important [1]. The capacity to meet these demands is related to health literacy, which is characterized as having the motivation, knowledge, and competence to access, understand, appraise, and apply information in everyday life in order to make judgments and decisions about one’s healthcare, disease prevention, and health promotion, as well as to maintain and promote quality of life throughout one’s life course [2].
Over the past decade, a number of studies assessing population health literacy across different regions have been conducted [3–10]. Disparities in population-based health literacy in different countries are unsurprising, but it is worth mentioning that about 12.4% of individuals aged 15 years and older have insufficient health literacy, and almost half of the individuals surveyed (47.6%) have limited (problematic or inadequate) health literacy [5, 9]. This is important, because lower health literacy is typical among individuals who exhibit poor health, rate their health quality as low [6, 9], have worse self-management behavior [11, 12], and are less engaged in health-promoting behaviors [13].
Most studies have revealed a positive correlation between health literacy and social status [6, 9]. Yet, we do not yet have clear answers from assessing health literacy based on gender: some studies have shown that women have higher health literacy [5], while in other studies gender differences are not found [3, 7, 14]. Less ambiguous data have shown that age is negatively correlated with health literacy, with older adults having inadequate or problematic health literacy [3, 5, 7, 9, 15]. However, some...