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August 25, 2021
Anna Murray
On August 24, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Imperial College London issued a press release acknowledging the publication of an article titled “Worldwide trends in hypertension prevalence and progress in treatment and control from 1990 to 2019: a pooled analysis of 1,201 population-representative studies with 104 million participants” by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) in The Lancet. According to the first comprehensive global analysis of trends in hypertension prevalence, the number of adults aged from 30 to 79 with hypertension has increased from 650 million to 1.28 billion in the last thirty years.
The study, which was carried out by a global network of physicians and researchers, spanned the years 1990 to 2019. It used blood pressure measurement and treatment data from over 100 million people aged 30-79 in 184 countries, covering 99 percent of the global population, making it the most comprehensive review of global hypertension trends to date.
Hypertension is one of the leading causes of death and disease worldwide, increasing the risk of heart, brain, and kidney disease. And hypertension is the primary cause of death from cardiovascular disease in 17.1 million people each year. It is easily detected by taking blood pressure at home or in a health center, and it is frequently effectively treated with low-cost medications.
Almost half of these people were unaware they had hypertension. Because they were never diagnosed, approximately 580 million people with hypertension (41 percent of women and 51 percent of men) were unaware of their condition. The study also found that more than half of people with hypertension (53 percent of women and 62 percent of men), or 720 million people, were not receiving the necessary treatment. Blood pressure was controlled, which means that medicines were effective in lowering blood pressure to normal levels in less than one in every four women and one in every five men with hypertension.
According to the study, the burden of hypertension has shifted from wealthy to low-and-middle-income countries over the last three decades. While hypertension has decreased in wealthy countries, it has increased in many poorer countries.