Aim:

Hypertension (HT) is a common disease worldwide and in Turkey. The prevalence of HT in Turkey is 31.8%. HT is also a costly disease that affects important vital organs, leading to significant morbidity and mortality. The most important feature of HT is its low awareness because of its symptoms are faint. In the HT prevalence study conducted by the Turkish Hypertension and Kidney Disease Association, HT awareness was determined as 40%, 31% of the hypertensive individuals used antihypertensive medications and 8% of them were under control of blood pressure (BP). In our study, we aimed to evaluate HT awareness among medical faculty students and employees.

Material and Methods:

A number of questions were asked to the employees and students in order to evaluate the knowledge of HT. Our question briefly; Is there HT in the family, have you ever done the BP measurement, where did you get the BP measurement, Do you have a BP measurement device at home, do you know the brand name of the BP measuring device? ın which case the BP measurement should be made, do you know about the HT frequency, Do you know the effects of HT, If you have HT and you are taking antihypertensive medications. After the questionnaire forms were completed, the data were analyzed.

Results:

A total of 456 people responded to the survey questions. The average age of the participants was 21.49 ± 4.10 (39.5% female) while 85.5% were university students. 45% in family with HT, 67.5% had a BP measurement, 42.8% had BP measurements in the hospital, 47.4% had the BP measuring device at home, 11.8% indicated that the measurement was performed routinely without any symptoms, 27% have knowledge about HT frequency , 45.8% had knowledge of HT effects, while 54 of those with high BP were receiving antihypertensive treatment. In the logistic regression analysis, those who had HT in the family, had a home BP measuring device, had information about the HT frequency, and knew the effects of HT were determined as parameters affecting the BP measurement.

Conclusion:

For the first time in our work, we evaluated HT awareness in NKU Medical faculty students and employees. We have found that our knowledge of HT frequency and effectiveness is very low. We think that awareness should be increased with training meetings.

Keywords: Hypertension, awareness, awareness of medical students, awareness of health professionals