When was the last time you were checked for high blood pressure? Cases have more than doubled in the past 30 years and half go untreated, study shows

Hypertension is easily diagnosed by monitoring blood pressure, and can be treated with low-cost drugs, but nearly half the people who have it don’t know they do

Your genes affect whether you will suffer it, but most risk factors – unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, and tobacco and alcohol consumption – are modifiable

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High blood pressure cases doubled globally in the last three decades and half go untreated. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 5:15am, 27 Aug 2021

The number of people living with high blood pressure – about 1.3 billion globally – has more than doubled since 1990, according to a major study published this week. About half of all sufferers went untreated in 2019.

Also called hypertension, it is a silent killer often driven by obesity, is directly linked to more than 8.5 million deaths each year, and is the leading risk factor for stroke, heart, liver and kidney disease.

To find out how rates of hypertension have developed globally over the past 30 years, an international team from Non-Communicable Disease Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which works closely with the World Health Organisation (WHO), analysed data from more than 1,200 national studies covering nearly every country in the world.

They used modelling to estimate high blood pressure rates across populations, as well as the number of people taking medication for the condition.

Hypertension or high blood pressure is directly linked to more than 8.5 million deaths each year. Photo: Shutterstock

The analysis found that in 2019 there were 626 million women and 652 million men living with hypertension. This represented roughly double the estimated 331 million women and 317 million men with the condition in 1990.