Article Text

Salt reduction in England from 2003 to 2011: its relationship to blood pressure, stroke and ischaemic heart disease mortality
  1. Feng J He,
  2. Sonia Pombo-Rodrigues,
  3. Graham A MacGregor
  1. Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Feng J He; f.he{at}qmul.ac.uk

Abstract

Objectives To determine the relationship between the reduction in salt intake that occurred in England, and blood pressure (BP), as well as mortality from stroke and ischaemic heart disease (IHD).

Design Analysis of the data from the Health Survey for England.

Setting and participants England, 2003 N=9183, 2006 N=8762, 2008 N=8974 and 2011 N=4753, aged ≥16 years.

Outcomes BP, stroke and IHD mortality.

Results From 2003 to 2011, there was a decrease in mortality from stroke by 42% (p<0.001) and IHD by 40% (p<0.001). In parallel, there was a fall in BP of 3.0±0.33/1.4±0.20 mm Hg (p<0.001/p<0.001), a decrease of 0.4±0.02 mmol/L (p<0.001) in cholesterol, a reduction in smoking prevalence from 19% to 14% (p<0.001), an increase in fruit and vegetable consumption (0.2±0.05 portion/day, p<0.001) and an increase in body mass index (BMI; 0.5±0.09 kg/m2, p<0.001). Salt intake, as measured by 24 h urinary sodium, decreased by 1.4 g/day (p<0.01). It is likely that all of these factors (with the exception of BMI), along with improvements in the treatments of BP, cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, contributed to the falls in stroke and IHD mortality. In individuals who were not on antihypertensive medication, there was a fall in BP of 2.7±0.34/1.1±0.23 mm Hg (p<0.001/p<0.001) after adjusting for age, sex, ethnic group, education, household income, alcohol consumption, fruit and vegetable intake and BMI. Although salt intake was not measured in these participants, the fact that the average salt intake in a random sample of the population fell by 15% during the same period suggests that the falls in BP would be largely attributable to the reduction in salt intake rather than antihypertensive medications.

Conclusions The reduction in salt intake is likely to be an important contributor to the falls in BP from 2003 to 2011 in England. As a result, it would have contributed substantially to the decreases in stroke and IHD mortality.

  • dietary salt
  • blood pressure
  • cardiovascular mortality
  • England

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Supplementary materials