Background: Hypertension is one of the most common cardiovascular diseases in black Africans and is a major cause of morbidity and mortality among Nigerians. It rarely has symptoms, therefore, one-third of the people affected do not know they have the disease. This study evaluated the severity of hypertension and associated risk factors and assessed the relationship between non-modifiable factors and the complications of hypertension in the studied population.
Methods: The cross-sectional hospital-based analytic study was conducted on hypertensive patients between January 2008 and August 2017 using demographic characteristics, complications associated with hypertension, and fatality of all the patients. The study involved 386 hypertensive patients selected by haphazard sampling technique where patients that visit the hospital automatically constitute the sample. The data collection instrument contains the socio-demographic and predisposing factors sections. Using The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 20, binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses were performed to determine the fatality and complication of hypertension at 5 percent significant level.
Results: The study involved 386 hypertensive patients, there were more males (53.1%) and heart disease accounted for most complications of hypertension (35.8%). Age was independently associated with fatality with higher odds (minimum of 2.602 and maximum of 3.527) across all age groups than the reference category and brain malfunction was independently associated with fatality with lower odds (minimum of 0.325 in eye disease and maximum of 0.982 in kidney disease) in the unadjusted binary logistic regression model while none of the confounding variables were associated with fatality in the adjusted binary logistic regression model. However, age and marital status were independently associated with complications of hypertension in the unadjusted multinomial logistic regression model (age group is 5.782, 5.204, 6876, 5.515, 11.635, 4.506 times more likely to influence heart, brain, lung, blood, eye and kidney disease) while gender was independently associated with complications of hypertension in the adjusted multinomial logistic regression model (gender is 0.792, 0.557, 0.250, 0.779, 0.980, 1.257 times more likely to influence heart, brain, lung, blood, eye, and kidney disease).
Conclusion: There is degeneration of hypertension into complications among the study participants. There is need to create adequate awareness of the prevention and early treatment of hypertension to forestall degeneration into the complication stage.
Key words: Hypertension complications, risk factors, cardiovascular diseases, fatality, multinomial logistic regression
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