Prevalence of hypertension and pre-hypertension among adolescent school children in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India

2016-11-24T04-45-51Z
Source: International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health
Lawrence Tony, Binu Areekal, Anish Thekkumkara Surendran Nair, Reshmi Ramachandran, Rekha Rachel Philip, R. S. Rajasi, Vijayakumar K..
Background: The foundations of hypertension in a person are laid in childhood and adolescence. The phenomenon of tracking of blood pressure is one where those children and adolescents who are in a high blood pressure category tend to fall in the same category when they become adults. Early diagnosis of hypertension and prehypertension in children and adolescents will help in reducing the prevalence of hypertension and its complications in the future adult population of any country. The objective of this study was to find out the prevalence of hypertension and pre-hypertension among school children 13-17 years in Thiruvananthapuram City Corporation, Kerala. Methods: A two stage sampling technique was applied; in the first stage the schools were stratified as government, aided and unaided schools using probability proportionate to size. In the second stage, from the selected schools one division or class from each standard was identified at random as a cluster and all the eligible children in the selected cluster were studied. A single BP measurement was taken using a standardized digital sphygmomanometer (OMRON IA1). Hypertension and prehypertension was defined as per national high blood pressure education program (USA), working group on hypertension control in children and adolescents blood pressure tables. The data was entered in MS excel and further analysis was done using SPSS 16.0 version software and proportions of outcomes were analyzed. Results: The total number of children studied were 2438, Boys 1274 (52.3%, 95% CI 50.28-54.32) and girls 1164 (47.7%, 95% CI 45.68-49.72). The prevalence of hypertension was found to be 21.4% (95% CI 19.64% - 22.96%). The overall prevalence of systolic hypertension is slightly high among the girls (19.4%) than the boys (18.2%), (P value>0.05). The prevalence of pre-hypertension among the study subjects was 21.3 % (19.65-22.95%). The prevalence of systolic pre-hypertension was found to be 21.4% (95% CI 19.74%- 23.06%) and diastolic pre-hypertension 5.3% (95% CI 4.4%-6.2%). Conclusions: The overall prevalence of pre-hypertension and hypertension was 42.6%. These facts show us that preventive interventions are urgent.


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