70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Age Sex Smoking Tobacco snuﬀ Alcohol BMI WHR WC Educational status Constant 2.207 Age −.009 Sex −.049 Smoking −.015 Snuﬀ tobacco .157 Alcohol −.048 BMI −.023 WHR .104 Educational status .065 All subjects Male Female No hypertension Hypertensive Hypertension diagnosed at screen Previously known to be hypertensive Table 2: Correlation analysis of hypertension and risk factors for hypertension. Abbreviations: BMI: body mass index, WHR: waist-hip ratio, WC: waist circumference. Table 3: Regression analysis of hypertension and variables. Unstandardized coeﬃcients B Std Error r −.411 −.088 −.095 −.169 −.270 −.344 −.290 −.367 .128 .411 .002 .058 .068 .093 .020 .006 .407 .046 t 5.375 −3.646 −.844 −.218 1.683 −2.463 −3.906 .255 1.409 P-value <.001 .022 .016 .001 <.001 <.001 <.001 <.001 .001 P value .000 .000 .399 .828 .094 .014 .000 .799 .160 International Journal of Hypertension 3 Figure 1: Proportion of hypertension in the study population. Figure 2: Prevalence of hypertension by age group and sex. Prevalence of hypertension by gender and age group in market workers in Enugu, Nigeria. Hypertension is deﬁned as systolic blood pressure 140/90 and/or diastolic blood pressure >/or 90 mmHg or on antihypertensive medication 120 n100 o i s n tre 80 e p y fh 60 o e c len 40 a v e rP 20 0 < 20 years 20–29 years 30–39 years 40–49 years Age group 50–59 years 60–69 years 70 years Female Male All subject Forty ﬁve percent of the respondents had high waist-hip ratio (>.85 for men and >.90 for females). Also 29.2% of the respondents had high waist circumference (>94 cm male, 80 cm female). Pearson correlation and Spearman’ rho correlation anal- yses as appropriate (Table 2) showed that age, sex, smoking, use of tobacco snuﬀ, alcohol consumption, BMI, waist- hip ratio, waist circumference, and educational status all correlated with hypertension. Linear regression analysis, (Table 3), showed that of all these variables, only age and BMI predicted presence of hypertension. 4. Discussion 4.1. Prevalence of Hypertension. In this study, the preva- lence of hypertension was 42.2%. In a national sur- vey of noncommunicable disease in Nigeria in 1997, the crude prevalence of hypertension using a deﬁnition of 160/95 mmHg was 11.2% overall, (11.1% males, 11.2% females) [14]. Analysis of the data in that study using DBP ≥ 90 mmHg as deﬁnition, gave a crude prevalence of 17.6%. In a study, of seven populations of West African origin by Cooper et al. [15], in 1997, the prevalence of hypertension was 16% in Nigeria and Cameroon. These two studies were conducted a decade ago. However, recently, Addo et al. [16], and Ulasi et al. [4] have documented very high prevalence of hypertension in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in urban areas, and poor control of hypertension in the subregion. It is possible that the very high prevalence of hypertension in our study group represents the increasing prevalence in hypertension noted across the globe. The high prevalence of hypertension in our study group may be explained in