Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: Hypertension is a very common chronic disease worldwide. Its imbalance is one of the main causes of cardiovascular and neurodegenerative complications.

Patients and Methods: We collected data from hypertensive patients who voluntarily presented for screening on both diabetes and hypertension screening days.Poor blood pressure control was defined as systolic blood pressure (SBP) greater than or equal to 140 mmHg and/or diastolic blood pressure (DBP) greater than or equal to 90 mmHg. The Student t test and the Chi-squared test were used.A threshold of statistical significance was set at 5% for the different tests used.

Results: These were 389 patients who were known to be hypertensive among 2012 patients who were collected at the diabetes and hypertension screening days (19.3%). The median age of the known hypertensives was higher than that of the nonknown (60 years versus 50 years). Men were significantly more affected by hypertension than women (60.7% versus 39.3%) (P<0.001).Most of the known hypertensives had a family history of hypertension with a frequency of 64.5% (P<0.001). One hundred and fifty known hypertensive patients were diabetic (38.6%) versus 238 who were diabetic without associated hypertension (15.2%) with a P<0.001. Smoking was found in 23.1% of known hypertensive patients versus 28.7% of those without hypertension (P=0.02). Alcohol consumption was found in 8.2% of the known hypertensive subjects versus 11.7% of the non-known hypertensive subjects (P=0.05). A minority was on diet (11.2%). The majority were on monotherapy (58.4%). The use of two hypotensive drugs was for 58 subjects (17.6%). The remaining 42 subjects were on triple therapy (12.8%).The mean SBP was 138.2 mmHg with extremes ranging from 98 mmHg to 215 mmHg and the mean DBP was 82.5 mmHg with extremes ranging from 50 mmHg to 120 mmHg. It was noted that 58.6% of hypertensive patients were poorly balanced.Almost half of the women were well balanced (50.3%) whereas only 35.6% of the men had a good balance of their BP (P=0.004). For both subjects with a family history of hypertension and those without, the frequency of well-controlled BP was almost the same (41%). Known diabetics had a balanced BP in 44.3% of cases, whereas this balance was achieved in only 39.6% of the non-diabetics (P=0.35).

Conclusion: The management of hypertension is part of the management of all cardiovascular risk factors, which also indicate the therapeutic attitude and target blood pressure values.