Prevalence of hypertension in people aged 20 years and older by world region and sex in 2000 (upper) and 2025 (lower) (Kearney et al., 2005)

The above figure, Figure 1: Prevalence of hypertension in people aged 20 years and older by world region and sex in 2000 (upper) and 2025 (lower), is reproduced from Kearney PM, Whelton M, Reynolds K, Muntner P, Whelton PK, He J. Global burden of hypertension: analysis of worldwide data. Lancet 2005; 365: 217-23, with permission from Elsevier (see: Kearney et al., 2005).

Remarks

The data presented above were obtained from a literature search of the MEDLINE database, manual searches of bibliographies of retrieved articles, and searching the WHO Global Cardiovascular InfoBase.

The literature search included studies published from 1 January 1980 to 31 December 2002.

Studies were included if they met the following criteria:

Where available, a national study for a country was used as data source. If no national study was available, the largest and most recent multisite or regional study was used.

Data were extracted independently by two reviewers according to a standardized protocol.

The grouping of countries was made according to the World Bank’s World Development Report 1993.

In total, 30 studies were included (10 from established market economies, 1 from former socialist economies, 2 from middle eastern crescent, 5 from India, 1 from China, 3 from other Asian islands, 3 from Latin America and the Caribbean, and 5 from Sub-Saharan Africa)

For 163 countries worldwide, valid data on hypertension prevalence was unavailable. For these countries, data from the country within the same world region with the most similar gross national income per capita was applied instead.

17 of the 30 studies did not provide data for the full age range of ≥20 years. For each of the 17 studies, data for the missing age ranges were estimated with statistical modeling.

For the region of former socialist economies no study met the inclusion criteria. A large study from Slovakia reporting hypertension prevalence with a different definition (≥160/ 95 mmHg) was used and a conversion factor from the English National Hypertension study was applied to estimate hypertension prevalence according to the inclusion criteria (≥140/ 90 mmHg).

For India and Cameroon (region Sub-Saharan Africa), rural and urban studies were combined and weighted according by the proportion of the population living in urban and rural areas.

Various methods were used to measure blood pressure in the different studies. Most studies (23) used a standard mercury sphygmomanometer as device. In most studies (24), participants rested for at least five minutes before before blood pressure measurement.

Hypertension prevalence was age-standardised according to the 1990 world population separately for men and women.

The crude age-specific and sex-specific hypertension prevalences for each country were applied to the WHO population counts in 2000. The estimates for 2025 are based on projected population changes and did not include potential changes of hypertension frequency.

For more details see Kearney et al., 2005.