Asians with high blood pressure are at greater risk of stroke and heart disease

• A paper from the George Institute for International Health on the outcomes of the study, to be published in the October 2005 issue of the European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation, notes that high blood pressure is a key risk factor for haemorrhagic stroke, which is relatively more common amongst Asian populations.
• A 10mmHg increase in systolic blood pressure was found to be associated with a 72% greater risk of having a haemorrhagic stroke in Asian groups, compared with 49% in Australia and New Zealand.
• Prof. Mark Woodward, Director of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the George Institute, who authored the paper, explained that "Cardiovascular disease is already the leading cause of death in many Asian populations, but the relationships between risk factors and cardiovascular disease can differ in Asian and Western populations.
• "A lack of data in the past has prevented the reliable quantification of such differences, which, if shown to exist, would suggest that different cardiovascular prevention and treatment strategies are required for Asia, as compared to western countries.
• "By far the greatest amount of evidence for the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease has come from the West, with very limited evidence from Asia.
• However, Asia is a huge region, where China alone accounts for approximately a fifth of the world's population.
• In Asia, stroke is proportionately more common than in Western countries; in some Asian countries (such as China) stroke is more common than coronary heart disease, the predominant form of cardiovascular disease in the West.
• "By 2020, the annual mortality from cardiovascular disease will reach 25 million and will have the greatest impact on populations from the lower and middle-income countries of the Asia-Pacific region.