Ideal cardiovascular health among Ghanaian populations in three European countries and rural and urban Ghana: the RODAM study
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Date
2018
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SPRINGER
Abstract
Cardiovascular health (CVH) is a construct defned by the American Heart Association (AHA) as part of its 2020 Impact
Goal defnition. CVH has, until now, not been evaluated in Sub-Saharan African populations. The aim of this study was
to investigate diferences in the prevalence of ideal CVH and its constituent metrics among Ghanaians living in rural and
urban Ghana and Ghanaian migrants living in three European countries. The AHA defnition of CVH is based on 7 metrics:
smoking, body mass index, diet, physical activity, blood pressure, total cholesterol, and fasting plasma glucose. These were
evaluated among 3510 Ghanaian adults (aged 25–70 years) residing in rural and urban Ghana and three European cities
(Amsterdam, London and Berlin) in the multi-centre RODAM study. Diferences between groups were assessed using logistic
regression with adjustments for gender, age, and education. Only 0.3% of all participants met all 7 metrics of the AHA’s
defnition of ideal CVH. Compared to rural Ghana (25.7%), the proportions and adjusted odds ratio (OR) of individuals who
had 6–7 CVH metrics in the ideal category were substantially lower in urban Ghana, (7.5%; OR 0.204, 95% CI 0.15–0.29),
Amsterdam (4.4%; 0.13, 0.08–0.19), Berlin (2.7%; 0.06, 0.03–0.11), and London (1.7%; 0.04, 0.02–0.09), respectively. The
proportion of ideal CVH for the various metrics ranged from 96% for all sites in the smoking metric to below 6% in the
diet metric. The proportion of ideal CVH is extremely low in Ghanaians, especially among those living in urban Ghana and
Ghanaian migrants in Europe.
Description
This article is published by Springer and is also available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11739-018-1846-6
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Citation
Internal and Emergency Medicine (2018) 13:845–856 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11739-018-1846-6