HBP can be controlled at less than $10 per patient: Study

It will be possible to control hypertension (HTN or HT), also known as high blood pressure (HBP), by spending only less than US$ 10 for a patient in a year, reveals a study.
Findings of the new study, published in British Medical Journal, have been unveiled in the city recently.
A press event on 'Bangladesh Hypertension Control Initiatives' was organised jointly by the NCDC Program of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), PROGGA (Knowledge for Progress), the National Heart Foundation of Bangladesh (NHFB), Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI), and Resolve to Save Lives.
"In Bangladesh, one in every five adults has hypertension," said Dr Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Many lives can be saved-and heart attack and stroke prevented-by investing in strengthening primary care services to provide blood pressure treatment to Bangladeshi adults," he said.
Life-Saving Hypertension Control Pilot Program from the DGHS and National Heart Foundation of Bangladesh could be expanded nationally.
Since 2018, Non-Communicable Disease Control Program (NCDC) and the National Heart Foundation of Bangladesh (NHFB) have collaborated with Resolve to Save Lives, a global non-profit health organisation, to implement a programme strengthening the detection, treatment and follow-up of high blood pressure in primary care.
Expansion of the highly successful initial project would save lives in Bangladesh by preventing heart attack, stroke, kidney failure and expensive hospitalisation for these conditions, and at an affordable cost.
Although most people's high blood pressure can be controlled with a simple medication regimen, of the estimated 22 million people with high blood pressure in Bangladesh, it is estimated that only 49 per cent have been diagnosed, 35 per cent are receiving treatment, and 14 per cent have their blood pressure under control.
The hypertension control programme from NCDC and NHFB has been successfully implemented in five upazila health complexes, which offer hypertension care that aligns with the World Health Organizations' HEARTS technical package.
The programme has so far registered 100,000 patients for treatment and has controlled blood pressure in 58 per cent of patients in treatment.
"Thirty per cent of deaths in Bangladesh are from heart disease, but less than 5 per cent of Bangladesh's health sector budget is allocated to address non-communicable diseases," said National Professor Abdul Malik, founder and president of the National Heart Foundation of Bangladesh.
"There is an urgent need to improve control of high blood pressure, which the pilot programme shows can be done at low cost through primary health care, even at the national level," he added.
The study, which used the HEARTS costing tool, an application designed to estimate annual hypertension control program costs, suggests that the HEARTS package would be even more affordable if there is more task-sharing among medical doctors and non-physicians and increased task sharing to allied health workers such as Community Health Care Providers, and further reduced by decreasing the unit cost of quality assured medications.
Expanding the roles of nurses and other health care providers to support blood pressure management could save money and make providing treatment more feasible nationally and more accessible to patients.
The study was conducted with funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

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