Obesity, high dietary salt, and tobacco intake coupled with poor physical activity are playing havoc with the lives of women in the remote Lahaul Valley nestled in the lap of Himalayas. An increasing number of women are finding themselves in the grip of hypertension, a silent killer.
The result is reflected in research conducted by Mandeep Kaur and Kuldip Kaur of Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar in five highly populated villages of Lahaul Valley—Keylong, Udaipur, Jispa, Sissu and Koksar. Researchers interviewed a group of 230 women from August to November 2021.
The distribution of female respondents in different categories of BMI, systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and other lifestyle factors were calculated. The risk of high SBP and DBP was observed among older women participants in the present study.
With respect to BMI, the maximum number of women was found in the normal category (57.4%), followed by overweight (19.5%) and obesity (12.2%), said the study. A meager proportion of women participants (10.9%) were underweight. In the case of SBP, maximum number of women had normal SBP (48.3%), 36.9% were found at the prehypertension stage, 8.3% in hypertension stage I and 6.5% women were in hypertension stage II.
The study reveals that only 57.4% of women have normal BMI, while approximately 32% are overweight and obese. Half of the women participants suffered from different stages of SBP and DBP. Moreover, there was a significant relationship among BMI, excessive consumption of sodium, use of tobacco, lack of physical activity and hypertension, the study concluded.
At present, hypertension is a major non-communicable disease in India and is particularly found among women. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 60% of the deaths in India are mainly due to lifestyle diseases such as obesity, hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and stroke.
It has been empirically established that obesity has a close linkage with hypertension. As per the WHO, an estimated 1.28 billion adults (30–79 years) from low- and middle-income countries suffer from high blood pressure.