Older Hypertensive Patients’ Adherence to Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors

Non-pharmacological treatment including diet, body weight reduction, smoking cessation and physical activity, is very important part of hypertension treatment. The objective of this study was to investigate the adherence to healthy lifestyle behavior in the representative sample of the older hypertensive patients, and to investigate factors associated with adherence in the studied older population. The study was conducted on random sample of 362 long term hypertensive (> five years) patients older than 65 years of age, at Health Care Center of Kragujevac. Adherence was assessed using the structured questionnaire for the analysis of the implementation of both hypertension and diabetes guidelines in the primary care. Both bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted. Nearly 35% of examined patients were highly adherent; they exercised regularly, avoided smoking for at least five years and consumed special healthy diet prescribed for hypertension. Another 35.6% of the cases reported exercising regularly, 39.5% followed the recommended diet for the hypertension, while 23.4% of the patients have still consumed cigarettes. Multivariate logistic regression demonstrated that received counseling on healthy lifestyle behaviors by physicians and lack of education predicted high adherence to healthy lifestyle behavior. In order to improve adherence of elderly hypertensive patients to healthy lifestyle, strengthening patient-physician relationships through efforts to enhance communication may be a promising strategy to enhance patients' engagement in healthy lifestyle behaviors for hypertension. Such an improvement could be achieved through the education of both the physicians and patients.