Hypertension prevalence awareness, treatment and control in North Nashville

North Nashville is a largely African-American community known to suffer from increased cardiovascular mortality compared with whites in the same area of Davidson County. The burden of hypertension, a well-known risk factor for cardiovascular death, has not been fully described for this population. To quantify the prevalence, awareness, treatment and control of hypertension in the North Nashville community, we screened 132 patients aged 18 and older at the 2005 Juneteenth festival on Jefferson Street. We compared our results to data for African-Americans from the most recent NHANES survey. Compared to the national survey, our study population had a higher prevalence of hypertension (52.3 percent versus 33.5 percent) and lower awareness (68.1 percent versus 73.9 percent), treatment (46.4 percent versus 63.0 percent) and control of hypertension (13.0 percent versus 28.1 percent) despite comparable age. This study adds to a growing literature on the racial and geographic disparities in health status in the Unites States and cautions that data from national surveys may not be representative of individual communities.