Cerebrovascular and cardiovascular diseases (CCD) have become the number one life threatening disease in China. The China Ministry of Health recently announced the fast increase of patients with high blood pressure and the number of patients had reached 160 million. Every 15 seconds, one person would die of CCD related disease.
According to a report from chinanews.com, what makes people worry is that among the 160 million patients, only 32.2% know they have high blood pressure and merely 6.1% are receiving efficient treatment. Also, the age of the patient goes down every year.
A cardiovascular expert said that 99% of the high blood pressure patients have to be on life-long medication, however, only a very little portion of them stick with the medication. Especially young people, since they still have elastic blood vessels and higher tolerance for the disease, they tend to have less symptom and are less likely to follow doctors’ suggestions to take medication, even they know the severity of the disease.
A survey from 2004 shows there are over 18.8% of Chinese people over 18 years old suffered high blood pressure. That was over 70 million patients and a 31% increase from 1991. In 1998, CCD became the number two deadly disease among the urban population and number one in rural population. Every year, over 1 million people died of the disease in China.
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