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.”
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000