Nigeria will require N500 billion to treat the growing cases of hypertension alone because of its notoriety.

The country trails behind the United States which spends 20 trillion naira alongside other developed countries because hypertension-related cases had attained one of the world’s most killer diseases.

A professor of medicine at the University of Ilorin, Ibraheem Adeola Katibi, made this submission at the weekend while delivering the 126th inaugural lecture of the institution entitled: “The choice is yours, but the burden is ours.”

Prof. Katibi said that hypertension-related diseases are mostly caused by sufferers through their eating and drinking habits and that this is common among women, the aged and obesities. High records also are both in Nigeria and the United States.

According to him, hypertension afflicts over one billion people worldwide and between 19.3 to 34.8 per cent of Nigerian population live with hypertension translating into a total figure of about 40 million people.

Prof. Katibi said: “The unfortunate thing about it is that the choice to be hypertensive is that of the patients, but the burden of treatment lies with the people who are denied basic necessities of life that the funds used to treat them could have provided.

“Stroke and heart attack, which are both quick to kill, are devastating complications of hypertension with over 16 million stroke cases alone which gives strong 30 per cent chances of the cases to die later in the hospital.”