A predominance of hypertensive heart disease among patients with cardiac disease in Buea, a semi-urban setting, South West Region of Cameroon

Abstract

ObjectiveThe pattern of heart disease is diverse within and among world regions. The little data on the spectrum of heart disease in Cameroon has been so far limited to major cities. We sought to describe the pattern of heart disease in Buea, the South West Region of Cameroon, a semi-urban setting. This was a descriptive cross-sectional study. Between June 2016 and April 2017 the echocardiography register of the Buea Regional Hospital was surveyed. We extracted data on the age, sex and echocardiographic diagnosis.ResultsOut of 529 patients who underwent echocardiography, 239 (45.2%) had a definite heart disease. There were 137 (57.3%) females. The mean age was 58 years (range 3–94 years). The most common echocardiographic diagnoses were hypertensive heart disease (43.2%), dilated cardiomyopathies (17.6%), ischemic heart diseases (9.6%), and cor pulmonale (8.8%). Rheumatic heart disease affected 6.7% of the patients. The most common rheumatic heart disease was mitral stenosis followed by mitral regurgitation. Congenital heart disease represented 2.1% and 5 patients (2.1%) had pulmonary hypertension. Hypertensive heart disease is the most common cardiac disease in this semi-urban region in Cameroon. Rheumatic heart disease still affects a sizable proportion of patients. Prevention of cardiac disease in our setting should focus on mass screening, the treatment and control of hypertension.

The Spectrum of heart disease among adults at the Bamenda Regional Hospital, North west Cameroon: a semi urban setting

“…More than half of reported cases were related to degenerative processes. Our findings are contrary to those of Jingi et al and Nkoke et al of the West and Southwest regions of Cameroon respectively, who reported cardiomyopathies as the second leading type of heart disease [9,10].…”

“…Hypertensive heart disease was the leading type of heart disease in our setting, accounting for 41.1 %. This is similar to findings of Tchoumi and Bureta conducted in a rural setting of the Northwest Region [11] and other semi-urban and urban settings in Cameroon [9][10][11]17]. Given the high hypertension rates in the general Cameroonian population [18], coupled with the contrastingly poor awareness, treatment and control rates [16,[18][19][20], our findings were expected.…”

“…This could be explained by the fact that rheumatic heart disease occurs in a relatively young population and people aged < 30 years represent only 8.3% of our study population. Nonetheless, 1.1% of all cases of heart disease was secondary to RHD in our study, which is relatively lower than 3.4% reported by Jingi et al in the West Region [10].…”

“…In Cameroon, there is a dearth of evidence on the profile of heart diseases with a few hospital-based studies in urban, semi-urban and rural areas of the country [9][10][11]. These studies highlight HHD, cardiomyopathy and RHD as the leading causes of heart disease in Cameroon.…”

Cardiac ultrasound in resource-limited settings (CURLS): towards a wider use of basic echo applications in Africa

“…878 titles and abstracts were screened; nine papers provided relevant information on etiologies of cardiac failure in SSA [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28], nine additional papers were identified by reviewing references [18,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36].…”