By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter If you are too fat, eat too much salty foods, drink too much alcohol and sit around all day, then you fit the profile for hypertension.
AS COMMON as hypertension is, medical science is still unable to pin down its causes. In only a few cases, perhaps no more than about five per cent of cases, Professor Rainford Wilks, director, Epidemiology Research Unit, TMRI, University of the West Inides, indicates that the causes are identifiable.
This would be in cases of secondary hypertension where for example, the patient experienced kidney damage or developed a tumour that produced excess adrenalin or took certain medications or other chemicals and then went on to develop hypertension.
All is not lost however, as in the other 95 per cent of hypertension cases, Professor Wilks indicates that epidemiological studies clearly identify a strong association between hypertension and factors such as genetics, obesity, salt and potassium intake, chronic alcohol use, psychosocial stress, early life origins and sedentarism.
"Controversy rages about the biology (that is, the exact pathway in the body whereby the risk factors affect hypertension) but the epidemiology is very convincing; there is a strong association between hypertension and obesity, alcohol, salt, age... The biology however, still begs a few questions," he said.
The convincing epidemiological studies notwithstanding, it is also still not easy to prove cause-effect relationships between the risk factors and the development of hypertension.
"If we say, for example, that obese people have hypertension, I can point you to a fat woman who is not hypertensive. There are going to be those who don't fit the profile, they are not obese, they don't report eating a lot of salt and so on...and blood pressure is the end result of the interplay of so many different physiological and metabolic goings-on in the body.
"So the point is to discuss causes in terms of risks; so there is a measurable increase in the chance of your being hypertensive if you have certain risk factors," Professor Wilks further explained.
