World Health Day: focusing on hypertension in 2013.

The World Health Organization celebrates World Health Day each year by focusing on an important global health issue. For World Health Day 2013, they have selected hypertension as the theme.1 The selection of hypertension is based on recently published World Health Organization–sponsored studies that have found that increased blood pressure plays a critical and increasing role in causing death and disability worldwide.2 A total of 13% of all deaths (9.4 million annually) and 7% of disabilities are caused by increased blood pressure—marked increases over the last estimates in 1990.2 Approximately half of hypertension-related disease occurs in those with increased but still “normal” blood pressure (“high normal” or “prehypertension”), and the other half in those who meet clinical criteria for hypertension.3 World Health Day’s focus on hypertension is intended • to raise awareness of the causes and consequences of high blood pressure; • to provide information on how to prevent high blood pressure and related complications; • to encourage adults to check their blood pressure and to follow the advice of health-care professionals; • to encourage self-care to prevent high blood pressure; • to make blood pressure measurement affordable to all; and • to incite national and local authorities to create enabling environments for healthy behaviours.1