Life stress 'a silent killer'
Updated on 19 April 2007
Medical advances in treating heart disease are being undermined by the stresses of everyday life, a new report warns.
The pace of ordinary existence is boosting the incidence of high blood pressure and threatening a global epidemic of cardiovascular disease, according to international health experts.
"If high blood pressure was an infectious disease, we would mobilise against it as militantly as if it was avian influenza or Aids," said the report.
"But this silent condition continues to be grossly underestimated by patients and their families, healthcare decision-makers, politicians, the media and the public, despite its dangerous and far-reaching health consequences."
The document, entitled High Blood Pressure and Health Policy: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go Next, was unveiled at the European Parliament in Brussels.
And its authors hope the statistics will prompt a new campaign to tackle hypertension - not least by a switch to healthier less hectic lifestyles. High blood pressure, or hypertension, now affects 25% of the world's adults - about one billion people. And the report warns the figure will grow by 60% by 2025 unless action is taken.
Every year the problem causes an estimated 7.1 million deaths, and the increasing incidence of hypertension is greatest in rapidly emerging countries with westernised economies, such as Brazil, China, India, Russia, Turkey and the Central European states.
One of the report's authors, Dr Panos Kanavos of the London School of Economics, commented: "High blood pressure is a condition whereby incidence increases with age, but this does not mean that it is a problem that only affects old people.
"Uncontrolled high blood pressure among people in their 30s, 40s and 50s will inevitably lead to an increase in cardiovascular disease and stroke that will strike down men and women at the height of their earning power, potentially turning them from drivers of economic growth and sources of public revenues to long-term recipients of extensive social benefits with increased healthcare needs."
Dr Kanavos called for a concerted public policy effort aimed at earlier hypertension diagnosis, and tackling its underlying causes. Unless lifestyles are modified and diagnosis and treatment of high blood pressure improved, "late-20th century gains in treating cardiovascular disease may stagnate or reverse, putting both individuals and healthcare systems at unnecessarily greater risk," says the report.
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