SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research International Journal of Hypertension Volume 2010, Article ID 970694, 6 pages doi:10.4061/2010/970694 Research Article Prevalence, Awareness, Treatment, and Control of Hypertension in Romania: Results of the SEPHAR Study M. Dorobantu,1 R. O. Darabont,2 E. Badila,1 and S. Ghiorghe1 1 Department of Cardiology, Emergency Hospital Floreasca, 8 Calea Floreasca, 014461 Bucharest, Romania 2 Department of Cardiology, University Emergency Hospital, 050098 Bucharest, Romania Correspondence should be addressed to M. Dorobantu, maria.dorobantu@gmail.com Received 11 July 2009; Revised 3 November 2009; Accepted 20 December 2009 Recommended by Csaba Farsang East European countries have reported high prevalence of Arterial Hypertension (AHT). In order to investigate the data for Romania, we ﬁrstly performed a national survey—the Study for the Evaluation of Prevalence of Hypertension and Cardiovascular Risk in Adult Population in Romania (SEPHAR). A representative population was selected using stratiﬁed proportional sampling, including 2017 adult subjects, ≥18 years old. The general prevalence of AHT was 44,92%, higher in men (50,17%) than in women (41,11%) (P < .0001) and predominant in rural areas (49,47%) in comparison to the urban ones (41,58%) (P < .02). AHT awareness attended 44,26%, rising with age, signiﬁcantly lower in men (34,58%) than in women (52,8%) (P < .0006). We have found a 38,85% proportion of treated hypertensive persons, worse for men (30,11%) then for women (46,56%) (P < .003). The rate of AHT control was 19,88%, with no signiﬁcant diﬀerences between gender. In conclusion, we estimated for Romania a high prevalence of AHT, a level of awareness and treatment lower than in many European countries and a rate of treatment control at the inferior limit of the European average. Males, characterized by a higher prevalence of AHT, were also less aware and less treated than women. Copyright © 2010 M. Dorobantu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1. Introduction The population impact of arterial hypertension (AHT) consists in its high prevalence and in the strength of its risk ratio with cardiovascular pathologic conditions. More than a quarter of the world adult population is already hypertensive and this number is projected to increase to 1,56 billion people by 2025. This estimation relies especially on a steep increase of AHT in the developing countries [1, 2]. A large number of clinical trials have shown that the cardiovascular risk could be considerably diminished by a tight reduction of the blood pressure (BP) values. Despite their encouraging data, the real rates of arterial hypertension awareness, and control are continuing to remain unsatisfac- tory in many areas of the world [3, 4]. Romania is an East European developing country, with a high mortality in cardiovascular disease, as was reconﬁrmed in the last European Cardiovascular Disease Statistics report [5] and it is supposed that uncontrolled AHT is an important contributor to this result. In order to ﬁnd out the prevalence, the awareness, and the control of blood pressure in Romania, we have carried on a cross-sectional survey, named SEPHAR: Study for the Evaluation of Prevalence of Hypertension and cardiovascular risk in Adult population in Romania. This study is the ﬁrst assessment of blood pressure and major correlated cardiovascular risk factors accomplished on a representative sample for the entire adult population in Romania. 2. Method The design of the SEPHAR study was similar with that of the NATPOL PLUS study, conducted earlier in Poland [6, 7]. The data of our study were collected during the year 2005. The procedures applied in the SEPHAR study were in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975, revised in 1983. The selection of the subjects was based on the method of stratiﬁed proportional sampling. Romania’s area was divided into ten regions, recommended by The National Commis- sion of Statistics. The locations of interviewing were selected