People With Hypertension Live Twice As Long As 30 Years Ago

Worldwide, hypertension contributed to more than 8.5 million deaths in 2015. Several health conditions are associated with it, including kidney disease and cardiovascular conditions such as strokes and heart attacks.

Even though high blood pressure with inexpensive drugs is fairly easy to diagnose, the medical community refers to it as a “silent killer” since the majority of people who have it don’t exhibit any symptoms. Almost 41% of women and 51% of men with high blood pressure do not realize that they have the condition according to new research by an international team of scientists.

People With Hypertension Live Twice As Long As 30 Years Ago

As a result, many of the women and men with hypertension were unaware that they had the condition, which led to 53% of them receiving inappropriate treatment.

Prof. Majid Ezzati says that nearly five decades after we began treating hypertension, which was easily diagnosable and treatable with low-cost medicines, there are still a great many people in the world without the treatment they need to control their blood pressure. Prof. Andrew Griffiths holds a Ph.D. in global environmental health from Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. In The Lancet, a new analysis has been published.

Control and treatment: a mixed bag

In this category, we have selected 1,201 studies representing 184 countries from which the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RISC) analyzed the data. A total of 104 million people were studied using blood pressure measurements and information about treatments. Based on a model developed by the researchers, there were nearly 1.3 billion hypertensive people aged 30 to 79 years in 2019 globally, up from about 650 million in 1990. An increase in low and middle-income countries has been the main reason for the increase.

Germany, the United States, and Portugal all improved their treatment and control of the disease. Among these countries, Canada, Iceland, and South Korea showed the most improvement.

Additionally, some middle-income countries, including Kazakhstan, Costa Rica, South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, and Iran, showed significant progress in treating and controlling hypertension. In these countries, researchers attributed these signs of progress to an expansion of universal health coverage and the strengthening of primary care.

Our analysis found that good practices can also be adopted by middle-income countries when diagnosing and treating hypertension, says Prof. Ezzati. IF international donors and national governments are committed to ending this major cause of disease and death, then these successes prove high blood pressure prevention and improved detection, treatment, and control are achievable in low and middle-income settings, he states. Although Nepal, Indonesia, and most of the sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania countries examined did not find significant improvements in treatment or control of hypertension, the study nonetheless concluded.

Women under 25 and men under 25 who suffer from hypertension in these countries received treatment less than a quarter of the time. Less than 10% of the respondents were in good health.

In the foreseeable future, with the growing number of people with hypertension and low detection and treatment rates, vascular and kidney diseases will overwhelm sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and South Asia. Says co-author Leanne Riley; Graduated from the United Nations (UN) Medical School in Switzerland with a Master of Science degree.

In order to achieve universal health care and primary health care, accelerating the detection and treatment of hypertension in these countries must be a priority, she added.

• Over the past two decades, researchers in 184 countries examined trends in how hypertension (high blood pressure) is diagnosed and treated.
• There have been nearly 1.3 billion cases of the disease worldwide over this period.
• In addition to smoking and poor diets that lead to obesity, researchers attribute the increase in obesity to smoking.
• There were 720 million individuals with hypertension in 2019 or more than half of all hypertensive individuals. Many individuals were unaware they had the condition.