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Aboriginal People in Manitoba 2000 Chapter 2 : Health

High blood pressure also appears to be a serious and growing problem among the Aboriginal community. Of on-reserve respondents in the 1997 Manitoba First Nations Regional Health Survey, 24% reported that a physician had told them that they had high blood pressure. This is higher than the national First Nations/Inuit rate of 19%, and higher still than the results reported from the 1991 Aboriginal People’s Survey at 14%. Seventy per cent of respondents had had their blood pressure checked within the past year.¹⁴

Hypertension occurs frequently in individuals with diabetes and co-morbidity between these two conditions leads to sharply increased risk of heart disease. A study released in June 2000 found that heart disease hospitalizations among on-reserve people in northern Ontario had more than doubled from 76 per 10,000 hospital admissions in 1984 to 186 per 10,000 in 1995. The researchers linked the increase entirely to increased diabetes rates. Among Aboriginal people in Manitoba, 60% of hospitalizations for heart disease involve patients with diabetes.¹⁵