Antihypertensive medications pattern and their effect in blood pressure control in patients attending Bishoftu general hospital ambulatory ward, Debrezeit (Bishoftu), Ethiopia

Abstract

Hypertension is an extremely common clinical problem, affecting approximately 1 billion individuals worldwide. Antihypertensive medications are a class of drugs that are used to treat hypertension. Recent studies have shown that prescribing practices of health providers for hypertension medication did not match the guidelines released by the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of high blood pressure (JNC VII & VIII). Hence, approximately half of the hypertension and various co-morbidities did not received from first-line treatments. A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted. Data was coded and entered into the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 19 for Windows. A 5% sample pretest was performed on randomly selected patients before the beginning of the study. A total of 288 participants were recruited and studied. More than half of the participant patients were female 164 (56.9%) and that of male were 124 (43.1%). Among the study participants 166 (58%) were prescribed with monotherapy and the rest 122(42%) were received combination of medications. More than fifty percent of the participants were diagnosed to have HTN only; a total of 124(43.1%) patients had one or more concurrent diseases. patients with age in between 50 and 59 (p=0.032) were almost 16 times more prone to develop poor BP control [95% C.I  (2.6-97.6)] compared to the other age groups. The single most common risk factor for poor BP control in our study was positive family history [(p=0.02) and 95% C.I (2.9-110)]. Patients who have positive family history of blood pressure had almost 18 times prone to develop poor blood pressure control compared to other studied risk factors like (use of high fatty diet, smoking and Diabetes Mellitus). The major determinants that contributed for poor blood pressure control were age greater than 50, BMI greater than 24.9, family history and the presence of other comorbidities. Females were affected more than males by hypertension in the study area and this result was consistent with a number of similar studies.