The World Health Organisation (WHO) has released its first-ever global report on hypertension. The report sheds light on the growing incidences of the silent killer and reveals alarming data of the prevalence of the disease across countries. The number of people living with hypertension has doubled from 650 million to 1.3 billion between 1990 and 2019. Hypertension affects one-third of the population worldwide and if proper treatment is made available to people, close to 76 million deaths could be avoided between 2023 and 2050, the WHO said.
Close to 5.8 million hypertension patients across 27 states were being treated under the Indian Hypertension Control Initiative (IHCI's) as of June 2023, the WHO report said and pointed to the availability of medicines as the "biggest challenge". The IHCI aims to achieve the government's objective of reducing premature mortality from non-communicable diseases by 25 per cent by 2025 through evidence-based strategies to strengthen the building blocks of hypertension management and control.
