Background: The Region of Murcia is an area, within the Spanish context, of high coronary and stroke mortality. Moreover, the trend in ischaemic heart disease mortality, decreasing for almost all geographical Spanish areas, has suffered in Murcia a slight increase during the period 1985-1991. In this study the population prevalences to different cardiovascular risk factors are evaluated.
Methods: Survey of a random sample of adult population (aged 18-65) with a response rate of 61%. Standardised measurement of arterial blood pressure, obesity and serum lipids besides a questionnaire of tobacco consume, physical activity and diabetes. Presentation of standardised results for overall age groups and for the truncated 35-64 age group. The field work were from november 1991 to march 1993.
Results: Tobacco smoking prevalence rises up to 54.4% in men and 31.3% in women. Figures for hypertension are less favourable in men (32.3% prevalence, 16.4% treatment, 2.6% hypertension control among all hypertensives, and 15.6% control among only treated hypertensives) that among women (23.7%, 34.3%, 9.5% y 27.8%, respectively). The average serum concentrations of cholesterol are low in both sexes, as high are the HDL-cholesterol concentrations. Mean Body Mass Index is 26.7 for both sexes, although women present wider variability in the measurements. The prevalence of self informed diabetes is around 3-4%.
Conclusions: Comparing these figures, for the corresponding age groups, with those offered by the MONICA study and with other studies on Spanish adult population it is possible to observe that, exception made for the high tobacco consumption and Body Mass Index seen in the Region of Murcia, the overall figures of cardiovascular risk factors are located in the lowest end of the distribution of MONICA centres ranked according their prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors. It might exist, therefore, differences in the management of the coronary patient that could explain at least part of the unfavourable coronary heart mortality trends observed in the Region of Murcia.