Have you checked your blood pressure lately?
Dr. Muhammad Shakir Balogun
The World Health Organization (WHO) was founded in 1948. To celebrate this, the World Health Day is marked every 7th April with a specific theme. This year the theme is hypertension – or high blood pressure. The ultimate goal is to reduce heart attacks and strokes. This is very timely because hypertension is major cause of illness and death in the world today. Traditionally, people regarded hypertension, alongside diabetes and obesity, a disease of the affluent; but we know today that hypertension knows no such socio-economic classification. In fact, it now appears to be a greater problem in the low-income countries, particularly in Africa.
But how common really is hypertension? The WHO estimates that one in three adults is hypertensive i.e. on average, every third adult you meet is hypertensive. This risk increases with age: for people in their fifties, every other person is hypertensive.
And what exactly is the problem with hypertension? Because it is characterized by a sustained elevation in blood pressure beyond what is necessary to propel blood to every tissue and cell in the body, it has harmful effects on various organ systems in the body. Over time it damages vital organs and causes them to malfunction.
In the brain, it can rupture the blood vessels, cutting off the supply of vital nutrients, leading to what we call a stroke. The pressure on the kidneys kills off the functioning units causing chronic kidney disease in which toxic substances, usually cleared by the kidneys, accumulate in the body with harmful effects. A person so affected will need dialysis which is very expensive, and ultimately, kidney transplant which is even more expensive.
In hypertension, the heart is forced to work extra hard to pump blood against a pressure higher than it’s designed for, leading to a harmful enlargement. Eventually, the heart is not capable of supplying enough blood even to itself resulting in cardiac attacks and heart failure which reduce the quality of life and lead to death. Hypertension can also lead to blindness due to the deleterious effects on the tiny blood vessels in the eye. And this can be very sudden.
All these complications of hypertension severely reduce quality of life and can result in loss of livelihood leading to unbearable financial burdens on families and greater misery.
The good news is that a considerable proportion of hypertensive disease can be prevented through easy, practical means recommended by WHO such as:
• Reducing salt intake
• Eating a balanced diet
• Avoiding ‘harmful’ use of alcohol
• Regular physical activity
• Maintaining a healthy body weight
• Avoiding tobacco use
The pivot of all these prevention efforts is regular blood pressure checks. Other ways of preventing hypertension include timely and adequate management of other medical conditions which may lead to hypertension. Such conditions include diabetes and chronic kidney disease.
High blood pressure is also treatable. Adequate and timely institution of therapy can prevent or considerably delay the complications and thereby reduce illness and untimely death. In fact, in many developed countries, comprehensive treatment and prevention programmes have led to significant reductions in deaths due to heart diseases.
To mark this year’s WHD, the president of the Nigerian Medical Association made a call for Nigerians to go for regular medical check-up to stem the tide of hypertension and other non-communicable diseases. This is important because hypertension is a silent killer. A number of people are diagnosed hypertensive for the first time after a cerebro-vascular (stroke) accident has occurred and the individual has already lost the use of one side of the body or is on the verge of death. One may not have any specific symptoms until the blood pressure reaches catastrophic levels.
So, what do we do? You can start by going for medical checks with your physician. If you can afford it, you should have a blood pressure machine at home. There are digital BP machines that are user friendly. Try to adopt the practical measures itemized above and educate others to do the same. Read more about health matters to improve your general understanding.
