Gláucia Maria Moraes de Oliveira et al. Miguel Mendes Marcus Vinícius Bolívar Malachias João Morais … Osni Moreira Filho Armando Serra Coelho Daniel Pires Capingana Vanda Azevedo Irenita Soares Alda Menete Beatriz Ferreira Miryan Bandeira dos Prazeres Cassandra Soares Mário Fernandes
Introduction
The World Health Organization (WHO) goal to reduce mortality due to chronic non-communicable diseases (CNCD) by 2% per year requires a huge effort from countries.–This challenge for health professionals asks for a global political action on control of social measures, with cost-effective population interventions to reduce CNCD and their risk factors (RF). Health professionals should demand from their government the implementation of acceptable cost measures, such as tobacco cessation counseling, guidance on healthy feeding practices and need for regular physical exercise, systemic arterial hypertension (SAH) control, and promotion of teaching and updating activities in programs directed to those issues. Those measures would contribute with around 70% of the goal of 2% per year reduction in CNCD.,Dyslipidemia, SAH and obesity are highly prevalent multifactorial diseases in Portuguese language countries (PLC).,Systemic arterial hypertension is the major RF for complications, such as stroke, acute myocardial infarction and chronic kidney disease, corresponding in importance to dyslipidemia and obesity for the development of atherosclerotic diseases.,In addition to their significant epidemiological impact, the non-pharmacological treatment of those cardiovascular RF plays a relevant economic role in the expenditures of the Ministries of Health, Social Security and Economy, because those affections are major causes directly or indirectly involved with absenteeism in the workplace. There is evidence that preventive actions are more promising in the primary health care setting.
The number of adults with SAH increased from 594 million in 1975 to 1.13 billion in 2015, being 597 million men and 529 million women. That increase might be due to both population aging and increase in number. When analyzing the trends in blood pressure (BP) levels of 19.1 million adults from several population studies in the past four decades (1975-2015), the elevated levels shifted from high-socioeconomic-level countries to low-intermediate-socioeconomic-level countries of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, BP levels remain high in Eastern and Central Europe and Latin America.
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