A recent news report, the World Health Organization (WHO) details the devastating impact of hypertension and outlines plans to tackle the problem around the globe.

According to the report “nearly half of them have no idea they have the condition, which causes heart attacks, kidney disease, and stroke. Four-fifths of them, including both people with a diagnosis and those who don’t know they are affected, aren’t getting adequate treatment to control it.”

According to this WIRED magazine article, blood pressure is caused by “eating a lot of salt, drinking alcohol, using tobacco, breathing polluted air, and not exercising”. It adds ” the remedies are simple, though not necessarily easy to scale: fixing diets, providing affordable medications, and building out health care and information systems so that people can be diagnosed and monitored without a lot of effort on their part.”

While higher daily consumption of salts is blamed for the cause of hypertension, some people are reportedly more sensitive to genetic mutations making them more sensitive to salt—other factors influence it as well.

Hypertension can be controlled effectively with simple, low-cost medication regimens, and yet only about one in five people with hypertension have controlled it. Hypertension control programmes remain neglected, under-prioritized and vastly underfunded. Strengthening hypertension control must be part of every country’s journey towards universal health coverage, based on well-functioning, equitable and resilient health systems, built on a foundation of primary health care.

– Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General (source: WHO)

Sanjay Rajagopalan, a cardiologist and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told Wired “This is very complex in developing countries. Urban migration, changes in food and culture, access to care, high levels of pollution—all of these are synergistic and result in much higher levels of hypertension.”

Most heart attacks and strokes in the world today can be prevented with affordable, safe, accessible medicines and other interventions, such as sodium reduction. Treating hypertension through primary health care will save lives, while also saving billions of dollars a year.

– Michael R. Bloomberg, WHO Global Ambassador for Noncommunicable Diseases and Injuries (source: WHO)

The WHO strategies to tackle the world’s most devastating health problem, the agency has outlined the following plan:

• “Protocol: practical dose- and drug-specific treatment protocols with specific action steps for managing uncontrolled blood pressure can streamline care and improve adherence.
• “Medication and equipment supply: regular, uninterrupted access to affordable medication is necessary for effective hypertension treatment; currently, prices for essential anti-hypertensive medicines vary by more than ten-fold between countries.
• “Team-based care: patient outcomes improve when a team collaborates to adjust and intensify blood pressure medication regimens per doctor orders and protocols.
• “Patient-centred services: to reduce barriers to care by providing easy-to-take medication regimens, free medications and close-to-home follow-up visits, and making blood pressure monitoring readily available.
• “Information systems: user-centred, simple information systems facilitate rapid recording of essential patient-level data, reduce health care worker data entry burden, and support rapid scale-up while maintaining or improving the quality of care.

Dr Tom Frieden, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and president and president & CEO, Resolve to Save Lives, says “Every hour, more than 1 000 people die from strokes and heart attacks. Most of these deaths are caused by high blood pressure, and most could have been prevented,. Good hypertension care is affordable, within reach, and strengthens primary health care. The challenge now is to go from “within reach” to “reached.” This will require commitment of governments around the world.”