Abstract

Background and Aims: Adherence to lifestyle management is an essential first-line step in treating hypertension due to its benefits in reducing hypertension, delaying the use of pharmacological medications, and reducing the incidents of complications. The current study aimed to assess the patients’ compliance to the use of lifestyle modification, to identify the factors affecting the patients’ compliance to the use of lifestyle modifications, and to assess the physician’s use of lifestyle modification as first-line management in hypertension.

Methods: This observational cross-sectional study was conducted among randomly chosen participants from 06 June 2020 to 06 July 2020, in Primary health care centers of Medina region. The questionnaire was formulated and designed with a consistent structure and relations between the questions to meet the study goal. All data analyses were performed using SPSS version 21.

Results: We found that out of the 1569 hypertensive patients, 90.4% had a good level of knowledge towards lifestyle modifications in hypertension management, 54.0% had good practice towards lifestyle modifications in hypertension management, and 66.3% of the doctors provided lifestyle modification advice to their patient.

Conclusions: There is a gap between the level of knowledge and practice towards lifestyle modifications among hypertensive patients, which could be due to cultural, social, and environmental factors. Physician’s adherence to prescribing lifestyle modifications was found to be at a moderate level. Multiple health disciplinary efforts are needed to improve compliance to lifestyle modification in hypertensive management.

Key words: Lifestyle, hypertension, Medina, Saudi Arabia, management