Young Blood Turns Hypertensive in Developing Nations

Eighty percent of high blood pressure disease happens in the developing countries.

As developing nations are caught in a frenetic pace of progress, there is something dogging the young with an uncanny regularity – Blood Pressure. It certainly cannot be dismissed as a stroke of bad luck but indicative of an unhealthy trend setting in, as portrayed by the recent study

Researchers in a recent study have shown the growing incidence of blood pressure among the young in the developing regions of the world. Nearly 80% of high blood pressure disease happens in the developing countries

Statistics as part of the study showed that in 2001, about 7.6 million people died a premature death owing to high blood pressure. Close to 50%of strokes at the time were attributed to the incidence of high blood pressure.

‘High blood pressure is behind one-third of all deaths in the developing nations’ says the report by M Dr. Carlene Lawes and colleagues at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "Overall, about 80 percent of the attributable burden occurred in low-income and middle-income economies, and over half occurred in people aged 45-69 years," the report stated.

According to the statistics from the World Health Organization's Global Burden of Disease, nearly 418,000 people from the developed nations succumbed to stroke in 2000-2001. Nearly 109,000 did not survive hypertensive disease during the same period. The statistics showed a sharp increase in the poor and developing nations that portrayed 2.5 million stroke deaths and 598,000 hypertensive disease deaths. Other deaths were attributed to heart disease triggered by the presence of hypertensive diseases.

The report concluded that:

"Rates of disease are generally much higher in developing than in developed countries for example: age-specific stroke rates in Tanzania are about three to six times higher than those in the UK. Most of the disease burden caused by high blood pressure is borne by low-income and middle-income countries, by people in middle age, and by people with lesser degrees of high blood pressure. Prevention and treatment strategies restricted to rich countries or individuals with hypertension will miss much blood-pressure related disease."

Source-Medindia
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