KNOWLEDGE AND PERCEPTION OF HYPERTENSION AMONGST PATIENTS

ABSTRACT

Hypertension remains a major global public health challenge that has been identified as the leading risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Hypertension is the commonest non-communicable disease in the world and all races are affected with variable prevalence. Early detection and adequate prevention strategies with proper treatment, and control must pay high attention to reduce the disease burden. The presence of hypertension more than doubles the risk for coronary heart disease; including acute myocardial infarction and sudden death and more than triples the risk of congestive heart failure and strokes. Obesity, unhealthy diet, diabetes mellitus, excessive alcohol intake, physical inactivity and smoking are considered as risk factors for hypertension. This research study aims to assess the level of hypertension among hypertensive patients attending consultant outpatient department in University of Benin Teaching Hospital, Benin City. A non-experimental descriptive survey design was adopted in this study and the study’s population comprised of 230 patients attending consultant outpatient department using convenient sampling technique. A self-structured questionnaire was used to get data from the respondents which was validated by the researcher’s supervisor and yielded a reliability score of 0.85 during the pilot study. Descriptive and inferential statistics such as frequency count, percentage, standard deviation and means were used to analyze the data obtained while Chi-square statistics was used to test the stated hypotheses of the study. The result from the study shows that a majority 53% of the respondents had fair knowledge of hypertension, while 28.7% and 18.3% had poor and good knowledge of hypertension respectively due to ‘a 48.4% of respondents who got their information on hypertension from health personnel’ which was the highest source of information.