The Standardized Management of Hypertension in Rural Shaanxi

Hypertension is common in China, but there are low rates of awareness (36.0%), treatment (22.9%) and control (5.7%) in the hypertension population of an estimated 200 million adults, a figure generated from the nationwide China Patient-Centered Evaluative Assessment of Cardiac Events (PEACE) Million Person Project (MPP) . Substantial health and economic burdens are caused by hypertension, and adequate control of blood pressure (BP) has been a national public health priority. In China, nearly half of population are living in rural areas , where lower treatment and control rates of hypertension compared with urban areas. Expenditure of antihypertension medications and insufficient professional ability of rural doctors were the major problems facing hypertension management in rural areas of China with backward economies. Absence of affordable medications prescribed may be a major barrier to adherence to medications. The rural doctors with insufficient professional ability had not to provide standard management of hypertension. So, an effective, cheap and simple hypertension control strategy was urgently needed in underdeveloped rural areas. My center has been devoted to the study of hypertension in economically backward rural areas of Shaanxi Province in Western China for decades. We provided a cheap and simple hypertension management plan suitable for these areas. Because the cost of the management was about $10 dollars per year, the plan was called the ten dollars project (TDP). The TDP included a management system and a cheap treatment plan. The management software for hypertension was designed to help rural doctors with poor professional medical ability standardly manage hypertension adhering to the guidelines. Of course, a more effective and affordable treatment costing about ten dollars a year is the core of this system. The aim of this study was to measure whether the TDP can effectively improve the control of hypertension in rural areas.