Black people have a higher risk of getting hypertension, especially from too much salt intake, than white people, a medic says.
Dr Irene Njeri, a consultant physician at Kiambu Level 5 Hospital, called for moderation.
"Usually one should take 6g of salt in a day, which is equivalent to a teaspoon of salt. However, you find many people use more than that, which exacerbates the condition in the patients," she said.
However, people overreact when given medical advice.
"Sometimes we advise patients to reduce the amount of salt they take and instead of toning down, they stop completely," she said.
"Such people end up developing even worse complications and they are brought back to the hospital in a coma sometimes."
Oftentimes, the people who have diabetes end up having high blood pressure since the two share common risk factors, she said.
Hypertension is often linked to witchcraft, but Dr Njeri said that is all in people's minds.
"You'd find that those who believe the disease is a result of witchcraft have suffered some trauma, which gave them stress," she said.
"Stress alone can lead to hypertension. I also think that people need more education on such diseases to counter such misconceptions."
She said people should go for annual checkups for hypertension so they can start treatment early enough before complications set in.
"High blood pressure checkups are almost free in many health facilities," she said.
"People should go for them because again, the disease doesn't have unique visible symptoms. In fact, a third of the patients don't even know that they have it, research has shown."
In 2019, Amref Health Africa, in collaboration with International Cancer Institute and Takeda, launched a pilot programme in Meru county called Blueprint Project.
It aimed to monitor and treat lifestyle diseases, such as cancer and hypertension.
As of September last year, data from Amref shows that the project had mapped out more than 154,000 households and reached more than 371,000 people. Of all these people, there were more than 10,000 hypertension cases.
Peter Otieno, the head of operations and technology at Amref Health Innovation, said so far, the project had trained 1,800 community health workers on how to use the testing machines and how to link possible patients to health facilities for further follow-up and monitoring.
"We realised that most people don't like going to hospitals for checkups, and so we organised health action days, where the community health workers meet with people and conduct tests and education," he said.
"That has proven successful by 80 per cent," he said.
Such programmes, however, can only be successful and transformative if embedded in the formal health system, Otieno said.
That way, they can achieve a higher rate of scalability, reach more people and attract more partners than when done in silos, as is the case currently.
Dr Njeri said patients should strictly follow the doctor's advice and prescription.
"I get cases of patients who take drugs until they get better and then stop," she said.
"That's risky because later, the disease recurs with even worse symptoms. The best thing to do is to keep taking drugs as advised by the doctor."
She said some forms of hypertension can be healed fully, especially those brought about by modifiable factors such as obesity.
