A Tribal Study Shedding Light on Blood Pressure

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Researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health were interested in learning more about what makes blood pressure tend to rise as we get older, and whether this still happens on a diet with very little salt. So they decided to study two remote tribes in Venezuela, one of which has Western influences on their diet because of the presence of an air strip near it. For the first time they also measured the children's blood pressure. Epidemiologist Noel Mueller is one of the epidemiologists who did the research, which has just been published in the journal JAMA Cardiology. Exposed to elements and with no steady source of income, refugees and internally displaced people in Iraq are in a constant fight for survival. Many of those living in the camps have no access to basic forms of healthcare and with little or no money, they cannot afford trips to hospitals or private clinics. Left untreated, common health complaints can lead to chronic and debilitating health issues. In Northern Iraq, a new mobile health clinic is reaching out to five different refugee and IDP camps, offering free consultations and medical treatment. As Hugo Goodridge reports, it has quickly become an invaluable source of healthcare, crucial to their survival. In the past two decades the people of Sri Lanka have endured many traumatic events; civil war, the tsunami of 2004 and outbreaks of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. After all this you might expect high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, but new research has found the opposite. The other main finding is that if Sri Lankans grew up experiencing adversity in childhood, this seems to increase their chances of having PTSD following a trauma in later life. Published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, Dr Sarah Dorrington, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, is the lead author. (Photo caption: A Yanomami native man eats next to his wife - credit: AFP/Getty Images) Health Check was presented by Claudia Hammond with comments from the Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley.