Global Health News: High Blood Pressure Now More Common In Poorer Countries

Gone are the days when the prevalence of high blood pressure was the greatest in the wealthier nations of the world. Research that was published in the journal Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, regarding high blood pressure in 2010 has yielded the finding that high blood pressure has become more common in low- and middle-income countries.

According to a report in Time, the research looked into 135 different studies on high blood pressure from 90 countries, with over 900,000 adults involved. In the year 2010, 31 percent of the global population, which is equivalent to 1.39 billion people, were found to have high blood pressure and 75 percent of those who had the condition were from low- and middle-income countries.

High blood pressure is now more common in poor countries https://t.co/YvjnsB3Bgp

— TIME.com (@TIME) August 9, 2016

NPR reported that the researchers discovered an increase of nearly eight percentage point of the prevalence of people with high blood pressure in low- and middle-income countries, a spike from 24 percent to 32 percent between 2000 and 2010. Meanwhile, 29 percent of the population of countries that have high income were found to have high blood pressure.

Senior author Dr. Jiang He was quoted in the report as saying that urbanization may have had a role in the increased prevalence of high blood pressure in low- and middle-income countries. He, a researcher at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine added that urban environments are areas that cause high levels of stress which can cause high blood pressure.

Science Daily reported that He and colleagues found that awareness about high blood pressure showed improvement for high-income, low- and middle-income countries from 2000 to 2010. Improvements in treatment rates for high blood pressure were also observed in the same period. High blood pressure control increased for high-income countries but dipped for countries that had low and middle income.