AGK PhD Data File

The ultimate goal of the study was to develop a reasonably robust model meant to establish the risk factors of hypertension amongst adults in South Africa attributable to extreme systolic and diastolic blood pressure values. Hypertension is becoming a global public health issue leading to global burden of morbidity and mortality worldwide and In sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa is one of the countries experiencing dramatic increase in the burden of hypertension.

The high prevalence of hypertension in South African adults (17.1% to 25.9%) was found to be predicted by age, bmi, gender, highest education level, race, physical exercises, family history of hypertension, depression, diabetes, stress and marital status after fitting the Bayesian binary quantile regression models. Convergence was achieved using the Gelman-Rubin diagnostic as indicated by the estimated potential scale reduction factors of less than 1.1 for both systolic and diastolic blood pressure risk factors, suggesting the Bayesian binary's accuracy posterior estimated upper quantiles and the associated 95% credible intervals.