prevalence of hypertension and perceived stress among university employees in solapur, india (2022)

Background: stress is an important psychosocial factor responsible for the hypertension. globally, university employees reported a high prevalence of hypertension, and perceived stress; however, in indian context, as few studies documented this association, we conducted a study documenting the prevalence of hypertension and perceived stress among employees of solapur university.material and methods: a cross-sectional study was conducted during june – september 2022 to screen 231 university employees for hypertension following international society of hypertension guidelines. perceived psychological stress was assessed with cohen’s perceived stress scale. chi-square test and both univariate and multivariate logistic regressions were used to evaluate the hypotheses. the significance level for the p-value was set at ≤0.05, and statistical analysis was conducted using stata 12.1.  results: the overall prevalence of hypertension was 39%. more than half of employees (54%) were under moderate to high levels of stress, and they were more likely to be hypertensive than those under low stress. staff with more than 30 years and in non-teaching posts were about two times more at higher risk of hypertension, and male staff, and those having moderate to high-stress levels were 2.5 times more likely associated with the risk of hypertension as compared to others.conclusions: university employees are under high levels of stress which are prone to developing hypertension. there is a need to screen more and more indian university employees for the presence of hypertension and stress to design appropriate hypertension prevention programmes.