Designed with objective to find the prevalence of high blood pressure in an urban community of Bangladesh, with special focus on its relation to other socio-economic or behavioural risk factors, this was a cross-sectional study among randomly selected 493 peoples of aged 18-64 years during the period from December 2004 to June 2005 in an urban community, Dhaka.
Prevalence of smoking tobacco was 13.8% (n=68) with total tobacco consumption of 25.76% (n=127). Only 7.4% of hypertensives did some sort of heavy exercise during any part of the week with mean value of 8.47 minute. Mean body weight of the whole study subject was 60.6 ± 11.2854 Kg while mean height was 161.5 cm ± 8.7393. Mean body mass index (BMI), Quetelet’s Index, was 23.23.
Mean Blood Pressure of the community was found to be 124/80 mmHg. Overall prevalence of hypertension was 27.6% according to 7th report of the Joint National Committee (JNC-7) on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure and World Health Organization International society of hypertension guidelines criteria. Blood pressure was found to relate with increasing age (r 2 =0.108). Blood pressure was found to rise with increment of body weight (for SBP r2 = 0.021, p= 0.001 and for DBP r2 = 0.044, p <0.001). BMI and high blood pressure were related significantly (? 2 (2) = 29.926, p< 0.001). Quantity of tobacco intake affects blood pressure to rise (r2 =0.022 for SBP and r2 =0.042 for DBP, p< 0.001).
High Blood pressure is a community problem. The whole community needs to come ahead with full preparedness to combat it.