Prevalence and Related Factors of Hypertension Among School Teachers in Kabul City-Afghanistan

Abstract

Hypertension is the single greatest preventable cause of death in humans and one of the most important modifiable risk factors for cardiovascular diseases. The objectives of this study were to determine the prevalence of hypertension among school teachers in Kabul City, Afghanistan, and to assess the related factors of hypertension in the targeted population. In this cross sectional study, the data were gathered via a structured pre-tested questionnaire developed by the researcher. The self-administered questionnaires were filled under observation; height, weight and blood pressure measurements were taken by the researcher in the surveyed schools. The data were analyzed by using IBM SPSS 21.0 Statistics program. Findings were presented in marginal and contingency tables. Mainly Chi-Square test was used with α= 0.05 to find out the significance level of difference and then binary logistic regression was used to assess the strength of association between hypertension status and related factors. Three different models were tested. The overall prevalence of hypertension was 16.7% (16.0% in males and 17.0% in females). Prevalence of hypertension was significantly higher in teachers aged ≥ 40 years than teachers aged <40 years (25.2% and 7.2% respectively) (p<0.001); in teachers who had more than 4 children (25.0%) (p<0.001) and among obese teachers (27.0%) (p<0.001). Opposite to the expectancies, hypertension prevalence was highest among teachers that stated their economic status as “good” (21.7%) (p=0.042). Logistic Regression analysis illustrated that older age (≥50 years OR=5.54, 95% CI= 2.39-12.82), higher economic status (excellent or good OR=3.62, 95% CI= 1.45-9.03) and number of children (≥5 children OR=2.03, 95% CI= 1.06-3.90) were highly related factors for hypertension in this study.