Cardiovascular risk factors in hypertensive patients born in Northern Africa and living in France.

Northern Africans constitute one of the largest immigrant groups in France; however, limited data are available on their cardiovascular risk factors. We carried out a retrospective cross-sectional study in a French hypertension unit, comparing 719 patients born in Northern Africa to 3558 controls born in Europe, individually matched for age and sex. Using a Bonferroni adjusted alpha-level=0.001, we found no significant difference between the groups for blood pressure levels, anti-hypertensive treatment, prevalence of target organ damage or the proportion of patients with secondary hypertension. However, patients of both sexes born in Northern Africa were less likely to take regular physical exercise than their controls. In addition, women born in Northern Africa were less often current or former smokers than their European counterparts (19.9% vs 30.5%, p < 0.001), but had a higher body mass index (28.5 vs 26.8 kg/m(2), p < 0.001) and a higher prevalence of diabetes (19.1% vs 8.9%, p < 0.001 after adjusting for BMI). These results suggest that targeted lifestyle interventions, including regular physical exercise, could be proposed to prevent weight gain and decrease the incidence of diabetes in hypertensive women born in Northern Africa and living in western countries.