Blood Pressure Is Most Lethal in Poor and Middle-Income Countries
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Defying popular wisdom about wealthy countries and coronary disease, a new study has found that about 80 percent of the world’s deaths from high blood pressure occur in poor and middle-income countries.
The study, published last week in The Lancet, found that strokes and heart attacks caused by high blood pressure were responsible for nearly eight million premature deaths worldwide.
About half of them, the study estimated, occurred in people older than 45 but younger than 70 — ages at which they were probably still supporting families — and in people whose blood pressure was not so high that they would certainly be on treatment in a wealthy country.
In wealthy countries over the last 50 years, such premature deaths have dropped rapidly as heart drugs have proliferated and even small hospitals have learned to treat heart attacks with blood thinners, catheterization and surgery.
An editorial in the journal noted that no major donor campaigned against high blood pressure and that “none of the major international drug companies have offered material assistance in this global health crisis, despite gargantuan profits from the sales of blood-pressure-lowering drugs in high-income countries.”
In the past, some scientists have proposed a “polypill” combining low doses of aspirin, a cholesterol-lowering statin and three pressure-lowering drugs, to be available without prescription to anyone 55 or older. At that age, they argued, the lives saved would outweigh the lives lost from rare side effects.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Defying popular wisdom about wealthy countries and coronary disease, a new study has found that about 80 percent of the world’s deaths from high blood pressure occur in poor and middle-income countries.
The study, published last week in The Lancet, found that strokes and heart attacks caused by high blood pressure were responsible for nearly eight million premature deaths worldwide.
About half of them, the study estimated, occurred in people older than 45 but younger than 70 — ages at which they were probably still supporting families — and in people whose blood pressure was not so high that they would certainly be on treatment in a wealthy country.
In wealthy countries over the last 50 years, such premature deaths have dropped rapidly as heart drugs have proliferated and even small hospitals have learned to treat heart attacks with blood thinners, catheterization and surgery.
An editorial in the journal noted that no major donor campaigned against high blood pressure and that “none of the major international drug companies have offered material assistance in this global health crisis, despite gargantuan profits from the sales of blood-pressure-lowering drugs in high-income countries.”
In the past, some scientists have proposed a “polypill” combining low doses of aspirin, a cholesterol-lowering statin and three pressure-lowering drugs, to be available without prescription to anyone 55 or older. At that age, they argued, the lives saved would outweigh the lives lost from rare side effects.
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