Online ISSN: 2515-8260

Prevalence of hypertension among sanitary workers in a tertiary care center, Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh: A cross-sectional study

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Saumitra Swaroop Sinha1 , Vishal Sukhdev Rathod2 , Snehal N Pawar3

Abstract

Background: Hypertension is an important public health problem and it has no obvious signs or symptoms making the persons unaware of condition. World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that around 1.3 billion people around the world suffers from hypertension and less than one in five have their blood pressure under control Methods: A cross sectional study, Study setting: Community medicine department of Tertiary care center. Study population: The study population included all the sanitary workers in tertiary care center. Study duration 2 months. Sample size: 311 Results: Only 10.7% of the workers were current tobacco users, while almost 15% were current alcohol users. More than three fourth of the study participants were physically active. More than 50% of the participants were obese (≥ 25.00 kg/m2 ). Abdominal obesity was present in about 35% of the participants. Prevalence of hypertension among the sanitary workers was 36.6% (95% CI: 31.3-41.3%). Only 34 (10.9%) participants were aware of their hypertension status and 80 (25.7%) of the participants were newly diagnosed to have hypertension. Prehypertension was present in 114 out of 277 participants (41.1%; 95% CI: 35.3-47.2%) without any known history of hypertension. Among the 34 patients with known history of hypertension, only 12 (35.3%) belonged to controlled status category. Current tobacco users had 1.61 times higher prevalence of hypertension when compared to those who are not current users and this was statistically significant (P = 0.003). Current alcohol users had significant association with hypertension (aPR-1.25; P = 0.02). Conclusions: The current study found that more than one-third of the sanitary workers had hypertension. However, almost threefourth of the hypertensives were not aware about their status.

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