The number of people living with high blood pressure has more than doubled since 1990, said a major study published yesterday, which found that half of all sufferers — about 720 million people — went untreated in 2019.
Hypertension is linked to more than 8.5 million deaths each year, and is the leading risk factor for strokes, and heart and liver disease.
To find out how hypertension rates have developed globally over the past 30 years, an international team from Non-Communicable Disease Risk Factor Collaboration analyzed data from more than 1,200 national studies covering nearly every country in the world. They used modeling to estimate high blood pressure rates across populations, as well as the number of people taking medication for the condition.
Photo: Reuters
The study found that in 2019 there were 626 million women and 652 million men living with hypertension.
That represented about double the estimated 331 million women and 317 million men with the condition in 1990.
Forty-one percent of women and 51 percent of men with high blood pressure were unaware of their condition, meaning hundreds of millions of people were missing out on effective treatment, the study found.
“Despite medical and pharmacological advances over decades, global progress in hypertension management has been slow, and the vast majority of people with hypertension remain untreated,” said Majid Ezzati, a professor at Imperial College London’s School of Public Health and senior study author.
In the study, published in The Lancet medical journal, Canada and Peru had the lowest proportion of high blood pressure among adults in 2019, with about one in four people living with the condition.
Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the UK had the lowest hypertension rates in women at less than 24 percent, while Bangladesh, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Solomon Islands had the lowest rates in men at less than 25 percent.
At the other end of the spectrum, more than half of women in Paraguay and Tuvalu had hypertension; more than half of men in Argentina, Paraguay and Tajikistan also have the condition, the study showed.
Robert Storey, professor of cardiology at the University of Sheffield, said that COVID-19 had distracted governments from hypertension.
“The pandemic of cardiovascular disease has received less attention in the last 18 months, but reflects concerning worldwide trends in unhealthy lifestyle choices such as high fat, sugar, salt and alcohol intake, sedentary lifestyles with avoidance of exercise and smoking,” said Storey, who was not involved in the study. “It is essential that best practice in government policy is adopted by all countries in order to avoid a time bomb of heart disease and stroke.”
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS