A tryst of ‘blood pressure control- sex- comorbidities’: the odyssey of basic public health services in Yunnan in quest for truth

The Basic Public Health Service (BPHS), a recently announced free healthcare program, aims to combat the most prevalent Noncommunicable Disease-“Hypertension” (HTN)-and its risk factors on a nationwide scale. In China, there is a rife that HTN less impacts women during their lifetime. We, therefore, aimed to evaluate the sex disparity in hypertension patients with comorbidities among south-west Chinese and the contribution of BPHS to address that concern.

We have opted for a multistage stratified random sampling method to enroll hypertensive patients of 35 years and older, divided them into BPHS and non-BPHS groups. We assessed the sex disparity in HTN patients with four major comorbidities- Dyslipidemia, Diabetes Mellitus (DM), Cardiovascular Disease (CVD), and Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), and descriptive data were compiled. Odds ratios from logistic regression models estimated the effectiveness of BPHS in the management of HTN with comorbidities.

Among 1521 hypertensive patients,1011(66.5%) were managed in the BPHS group. The proportion of patients who had at least one comorbidity was 70.7% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 66.3-76.8%), patients aged 65 years and older were more likely to have coexisting comorbidities. Participants who received the BPHS showed significant blood pressure (BP) control with two comorbidities (odds ratio [OR] = 2.414, 95% CI: 1.276–4.570), three or more (OR = 5.500, 95%CI: 1.174–25.756). Patients with dyslipidemia and DM also benefited from BPHS in controlling BP (OR = 2.169, 95% CI: 1.430–3.289) and (OR = 2.785, 95%CI: 1.242–6.246), respectively. In certain high-income urban survey centers, there was sex differences in the HTN management provided by BPHS, with men having better BP control rates than women.

Perhaps this is the first study in China to succinctly show the effectiveness and sex disparity regarding “management of hypertensive comorbidities”. This supports that the BPHS program plays a pivotal role in controlling BP, therefore should recommend the national healthcare system to give women a foremost priority in BPHS, especially to those from low-socioeconomic and low-scientific literacy regions.