Hypertension and health education intervention in the Caribbean: a public health appraisal.

Epidemiologic data on morbidity and mortality have established hypertension and its related diseases as posing a public health problem for the developing world.In the case of the Caribbean region, the increasing magnitude of the hypertension problem is complicated further by the region's fiscal crisis-its low cash availability for health expenditures and the concomitant experience in infectious diseases. Given these problems, it is reasoned that health education as an intervention approach is the only practical method to employ to address the problem of improved control of hypertension. The success of any such health education program will depend on, among other things, the framework used to guide the program, the population targeted on the basis of defined levels of arterial blood pressure and at-risk characteristics, and the specifics (ie, cultural, pharmacological, nonpharmacological, and motivational) of the message to be disseminated.