Socioeconomic Factors Responsible for Obesity Hypertension among Bangladeshi Adults

Abstract

Hypertension is one of the components of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). It is the primary risk factor for cardiovascular disease, including stroke, heart failure, heart attack and aneurysm.The causes of hypertension are diabetes, kidney diseases, nerve damage, overactive thyroid gland, sleep apnoea, pregnancy, obesity, etc. The problem of hypertension is more prevalent among elderly people worldwide and by 2025 the majority of the elderly people will reside in developing countries [1][2][3]. The disease is rapidly emerging in developing countries [4,5].Obesity is also prevalent among elderly people and it is influenced by many socioeconomic factors [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Again, obesity and hypertension are associated and both are in increasing trend among children also [12,13]. Hypertension is highly prevalent among overweight and obese primary care patients [14,15]. It is also prevalent among middle aged men and women [16]. Thus, age can be considered as a responsible factor for hypertension. As hypertension is one type of NCDs, it has many risk factors. Some of these risk factors are socioeconomic variables. Prevalence of hypertension, awareness, and risk factors were previously studied by some authors [16][17][18][19][20][21]. Again, socioeconomic variables are responsible for all types of non-communicable diseases and it was reported in both home and abroad [22][23][24][25][26]. In a separate study, it was reported that obesity and NCDs were significantly associated [27].The above discussion indicted that obesity and hypertension were associated. Due to this association a question naturally arises which of the socioeconomic variables are more responsible for the prevalence of both the diseases simultaneously among elderly people of Bangladesh. Thus, the objective of this study was to identify the responsible factors for the prevalence of the disease.This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License ANN.MS.ID.000671.