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.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS