Title
Effect of salt substitution on community-wide blood pressure and hypertension incidence
Date Issued
01 March 2020
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Publisher(s)
Nature Research
Abstract
Replacement of regular salt with potassium-enriched substitutes reduces blood pressure in controlled situations, mainly among people with hypertension. We report on a population-wide implementation of this strategy in a stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial (NCT01960972). The regular salt in enrolled households was retrieved and replaced, free of charge, with a combination of 75% NaCl and 25% KCl. A total of 2,376 participants were enrolled in 6 villages in Tumbes, Peru. The fully adjusted intention-to-treat analysis showed an average reduction of 1.29 mm Hg (95% confidence interval (95% CI) (−2.17, −0.41)) in systolic and 0.76 mm Hg (95% CI (−1.39, −0.13)) in diastolic blood pressure. Among participants without hypertension at baseline, in the time- and cluster-adjusted model, the use of the salt substitute was associated with a 51% (95% CI (29%, 66%)) reduced risk of developing hypertension compared with the control group. In 24-h urine samples, there was no evidence of differences in sodium levels (mean difference 0.01; 95% CI (0.25, −0.23)), but potassium levels were higher at the end of the study than at baseline (mean difference 0.63; 95% CI (0.78, 0.47)). Our results support a case for implementing a pragmatic, population-wide, salt-substitution strategy for reducing blood pressure and hypertension incidence.
Start page
374
End page
378
Volume
26
Issue
3
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Nutrición, Dietética
Sistema cardiaco, Sistema cardiovascular
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85079714460
PubMed ID
Source
Nature Medicine
ISSN of the container
10788956
Sponsor(s)
This study was supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (Project 5 U01 HL114180-01), under the Global Alliance for Chronic Diseases hypertension program. A.B.-O. was supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship in Public Health and Tropical Medicine (grant no. 103994/Z/14/Z). V.G.S.y.R. was funded by the Dirección de Gestión de la Investigación at the Pontifica Universidad Católica del Perú (grant no. DGI-2017-496).
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus