Hypertension blamed for premature deaths in China

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Mon Oct 5, 2009 6:30pm EDT

HONG KONG Oct 6 (Reuters) - High blood pressure is closely associated with more than a million premature deaths in China each year, a study has found, and researchers urged the government to beef up prevention and control measures.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is considered a preventable disease because many of its risk factors -- such as being overweight, lack of exercise, high salt intake, smoking and excessive alcohol consumption -- can be controlled.

"Primary prevention, including reducing the enormous average daily salt intake and lifestyle modification, will be a vital tool in such efforts," wrote the team, led by Professor Jiang He of Tulane University's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in the United States.

The Chinese study, published in The Lancet, tracked 158,666 participants aged 40 and over in 17 provinces from 1991 to 2000; and most of those who died of cardiovascular diseases, such as stroke and heart attack, had a history of hypertension.

There were 6,670 cardiovascular deaths during the 10-year period; of these, 60 percent were linked to hypertension.

"Our results show that raised blood pressure is the leading preventable risk factor for premature deaths in China," the researchers wrote.

From these results, they estimated that 2.33 million cardiovascular deaths in 2005 in China were attributable to increased blood pressure. Of these, 2.11 million had hypertension while 0.22 million had prehypertension - elevated blood pressure but below levels considered hypertensive.

Another 1.27 million premature cardiovascular deaths were attributable to raised blood pressure -- 1.15 million in people with hypertension and 0.12 million with prehypertension.

They defined as premature death women who died before 75 and men who died before 72.

While the prevalence of hypertension is high and increasing in China, awareness, treatment, and control are low, they added.

Worldwide, an estimated 972 million adults, or 26.4 percent of the world's adult population, had hypertension in 2000, according to an earlier study. That figure is set to increase 60 percent to 1.56 billion by 2025. (Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Nick Macfie)





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