Hypertension self_management during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The rapid spread of COVID-19 in the world is widely associated with many consequences in care, especially for patients with chronic diseases. The most common comorbidities in one report were hypertension (30%), diabetes (19%), and coronary heart disease (8%). Therefore, good control of high blood pressure is an obstacle to prevent the transmission of covid _19 in patients with high blood pressure. Evidence has shown that blood pressure selfmanagement interventions lead to a significant reduction in blood pressure compared to medical-based standard care. The covid-19 pandemic affects the management of hypertension. Therefore, we decided to evaluate the selfmanagement status of blood pressure in patients with high blood pressure during the covid-19 pandemic. method: It is a cross-sectional descriptive study that was performed in Tabriz health centers (Safa, Ibn Sin, 33 Laleh and Fatemiyeh). The participants in the study were 240 patients 30 years and older with high blood pressure duration of less than 10 years without comorbidities who were selected by convenience sampling and the study tool was a questionnaire. The standard was 32 questions. In order to adjust the confounding variables (duration of high blood pressure and comorbidities), the matching method was used, and then the data was collected and entered into spss16 software with the help of descriptive statistics and comparison of questionnaire scores. Based on gender, age, education and occupation, we analyzed the data with independent t-test. findings: The number of participants in this study was a total of 270 patients with high blood pressure, 30 incompletely filled questionnaires were excluded from the study, and 240 patients filled the questionnaire completely.The selfmanagement score of the patients was between 43 and 141 and the average self-care score was 105.21 (SD=15.33). The correlation coefficient of age with self-care was 0.29 (P=0.001). There was no statistical relationship between selfmanagement score and gender. There was a statistically significant difference between selfmanagement score and literacy level (P=0.001). And there was a statistically significant difference in terms of selfmanagement scores between different job groups. (P=0.006)