Prevalência de hipertensão em crianças e adolescentes escolares do Brasil: um estudo de revisão

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Systemic arterial hypertension (SAH) is a multifactorial disease characterized by high and sustained blood pressure levels during 24 hours. The problems related to cardiovascular diseases in adulthood arise in the early stages of life, requiring constant assessment of blood pressure. In Brazil there is a large number of studies related to the prevalence of hypertension in adults, but the data for school children and adolescents are outdated. OBJECTIVE: Thus, the aim of this study was to analyze the prevalence of hypertension in school children and adolescents in Brazil. METHODOLOGY: This study is a narrative review, which was performed through the databases: PUBMED, LILACS, SCIELO, using the keywords: Hypertension, high blood pressure, adolescents, children, students, students, school. Inclusion criteria were: 1) Original articles, 2) Articles with children and / or adolescents, 3) School background, 4) Made in Brazil. From this we removed the following information: name of the authors, year of publication, sample characteristics, methods used and the results. No date restrictions. RESULT: 27 national studies of hypertension prevalence in Brazilian school-age children and adolescents were selected. The studies are distributed between the Southeast (37%), South (29%), Northeast (27%) and Midwest (7%) regions. The total sample was 20,792 students. The prevalence of hypertension found in children (6 to 10 years) was 2.3% to 16.2%, with an average of 10.6%, in adolescents (10 to 19 years) was 10.2% and 19, 4% with an average of 14.3%, while in children and adolescents (6 to 17 years) it was 2.9% to 42.8% with an average of 14.2%. The Northeast region had the highest prevalence of hypertension and public schools had an average prevalence of 14.9%. CONCLUSION: The data presented indicated that the prevalence of hypertension in school children and adolescents is higher than that found in the last two systematic reviews. Altered blood pressure levels should be identified as early as possible to prevent future complications.