General Health Status and its Relationship With Health-Promoting Lifestyle Among Patients With Hypertension

Abstract

Background: Hypertension is a bio-psychological disorder and a major health problem in the developing countries. It is affected by people’s lifestyle. Objectives: The current study aimed to examine general health status and its relationship with health-promoting lifestyle among patients with hypertension. Methods: This analytic-descriptive study was conducted on 302 patients with hypertension aged 40 - 70 years who lived in Birjand, Iran. Convenient sampling method was employed and individuals with a systolic blood pressure above 140 mmHg or a diastolic blood pressure above 90 mmHg as well as people with a history of taking antihypertensive agents were recruited. The 28-item general health questionnaire and the health-promoting lifestyle profile were completed for the participants by the interview method. The data were analyzed by the SPSS software ver. 16.0 and through running Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests, the Spearman correlation coefficient analysis and the logistic regression analysis. Results: The mean age of the participants was 54.81 ± 9.83 years. The hypertension of 28 participants (9.3%) was effectively controlled while 152 ones (50.3%) and 122 ones (40.4%) had moderate and severe hypertension, respectively. More than half of the participants (53.3%) had some forms of impaired general health. The highest and the lowest lifestyle subscale scores belonged to the nutrition and the physical activity subscales, respectively. The Spearman correlation coefficient analysis revealed that except for the score of health responsibility, the scores of other subscales of lifestyle as well as the total score of lifestyle questionnaire were negatively correlated with those of the general health questionnaire and all its subscales (P < 0.05). Logistic regression analysis also showed that stress management, spiritual growth and total lifestyle scores were the significant predictors of the participants’ general health. Conclusions: Given the significant correlation of lifestyle components such as stress management and spiritual growth with general health, general health of patients with hypertension can be improved through developing and implementing stress management and spiritual growth stimulation programs and techniques.