Abstract
Objective: To identify the association between socioeconomic, personal and health care factors, with inadequate blood pressure control. Method: Cross sectional, descriptive study, of 392 hypertensive individuals, randomly and proportionally selected from among 23 registered in the Basic Health of a city in Southern Brazil. Data were collected from homes between December 2011 and March 2012, using a semistructured questionnaire. Results: Almost half of the respondents had inadequate blood pressure control, which was associated with age less than 60 years; Non adherence to pharmacotherapy; failure to attend scheduled appointments, and; use of three or more antihypertensive drugs. Conclusion: Among the actions to improve blood pressure control in people with hypertension, the health care team needs to create strategies that encourage attendance at appointments, scheduled and simplify the treatment regimen. Such activities should focus particularly on the elderly.
Highlights
Systemic hypertension (SH) has a multifactorial genesis, insidious chronic nature and evolution oligo/asymptomatic, which contributes to the non-adherence of hypertensive patients to drug treatment and/or for inadequate blood pressure control[1] The maintenance of high blood pressure levels, in turn, constitutes a risk factor for the emergence of complications in medium and long run, which surely implies the need for greater control of blood pressure (BP) of the population by professionals working in Primary Health Care (PHC)[2,3]
We have considered that the percentage of 50% could present the characteristic of interest with error estimate of 5% and 95% confidence interval, plus another 10% for possible losses.This resulted in a sample of 422 individuals, randomly selected and stratified, with proportional distribution of the sample size among people with hypertension registered in each Basic Health Units (BHU)
It should be noted that this fact, by itself, can already be considered as one of the results of this study, as it shows that a significant proportion of individuals with hypertension and that make continued use of medication did not have their BP checked not even at every two months
Summary
Systemic hypertension (SH) has a multifactorial genesis, insidious chronic nature and evolution oligo/asymptomatic, which contributes to the non-adherence of hypertensive patients to drug treatment and/or for inadequate blood pressure control[1] The maintenance of high blood pressure levels, in turn, constitutes a risk factor for the emergence of complications in medium and long run, which surely implies the need for greater control of blood pressure (BP) of the population by professionals working in Primary Health Care (PHC)[2,3] It is known, that the clinical management of Chronic Diseases (CD) such as hypertension, faces several difficulties, including structural problems, such as limited access to appointments, tests and medicines and problems related to the professionals themselves, because, besides the lack of skilled workers, many are unmotivated and unhappy at work[4]. Such evidence favors the annual occurrence of more than one million hospital admissions due to circulatory diseases, with costs that reach approximately one billion and 800 million reais, and still is the leading cause of deaths in Brazil[6]
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