Introduction:

The World Health Organization designed an instrument for the surveillance of risk factors associated with chronic diseases, it has three steps that include personal and behavioral, anthropometric, and biochemical data.

Objective:

To describe the applications of the STEPS Instrument (step 1) to identify behavioral risk factors associated with noncommunicable diseases in working adults, according to country and year of publication.

Methodology:

Narrative review of original studies that used STEPS, published between 2015 and 2019 in Spanish, English and Portuguese in the databases PubMed, SciELO, and the search engine Google Scholar.

Results:

A total of 20 studies were reviewed, of which 6 were from Asia and Africa, and the year of most significant publication was 2017. The most studied risks are harmful alcohol consumption, smoking, physical inactivity, and unhealthy eating.

Conclusions:

the use of the STEPS instrument in publications is more frequent in countries of Africa and Asia. Its implementation must be systematic and disseminated in other countries to design and implement public health strategies for the prevention, mitigation, and timely treatment of noncommunicable diseases.