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Authors’ response
* For correspondence: prasant47@yahoo.com
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We appreciate the author for his valuable comments on our article1 and also for his concerns over some of the issues including study limitations, gender differences in distribution of blood pressure and prevalence of hypertension. We used Centers for Disease Control (CDC) 2000 dataset for boys and girls to identify body mass index (BMI) percentiles instead of Indian standard due to non availability of such datasets from India. Hence, there may be some amount of deviation from the reality in terms of prevalence of hypertension, distribution of blood pressure and correlates of hypertension.
The second concern was that we observed higher mean systolic blood pressure among girls which was in conformity with earlier Indian study2 and high prevalence of hypertension (7.6%) which was not observed in Iraqi primary school children3. As highlighted by the author himself, such ethnic variation may be attributed to the variations in study design, definition of hypertension, methods of blood pressure recording, age range, sample size, ethnicity and socio-economic class and preponderance of obesity among Iraqi children4.
Finally, as agreed by the author we re-emphasize the need for strengthening of school health programme to prevent future epidemic and complications of hypertension. It has been revealed that school based intervention programme has the potential to reduce the risk of atherosclerosis in both the individual child and population at large5. Initiation of school-based heart health curriculum in Iraq is a commendable work that will certainly reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.
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