Arterial blood pressures and hypertension in an urban African population sample.

In the last three decades increasing attention has been paid to a systematic study of arterial blood pressures and hypertension in the native African.The recent reports have shown that, contrary to the opinions of earlier authors (Donnison, 1929; Vint, 1937; Kenney and Watkins, 1956), hypertension commonly affects Africans (see Symposium on Blood Pressure and Hypertension in Africa, 1969) and already certain peculiarities of the disorder are being described in them (Akinkugbe, 1968, 1969).For many reasons, nearly all the community studies have concerned rural groups of Africans, and worth-while studies in well-defined, unselected, and representative urban communities are few.This paper describes the results of a study of the distribution of arterial blood pressures and the prevalence and familial occurrence of hypertension in an urban West African population sample. AREA OF STUDYLagos, the capital of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is an urban area, largely over-crowded, cosmopolitan, and fast growing.The pattern of its health problems is slowly evolving into that of a town in the more socially advanced parts of the world.Since 1967, the Department of Community Health of the Lagos University College of Medicine has maintained 30 survey sample blocks chosen on a random systematic basis as a 'Community Health Laboratory'.The areas of the present study were chosen for the author at random from these survey blocks to give a sample closely representative of the entire 'Lagos community sample'.SUBJECTS AND METHODS OF STUDY All the permanent inhabitants aged 10 years and above in this sub-sample were considered for the study, but, during the survey, subjects who had travelled from their homes for more than 12 weeks were excluded.All the respondents were examined in their homes by the author and many of them were already familiar with him from previous surveys.Also, many of the women in the child-bearing age 26