Abstract

 Background and Objectives

 High blood pressure is one of the causes of blood donor rejection therefore, detection and treatment of the mild hypertension in donors have an important role in increasing the health level of blood donors and decreasing their hypertension-attributed mortality and morbidity rate and finally in preventing their rejection from blood donation.

 Materials and Methods

 It is a cross-sectional descriptive study conducted on 1854 donors of Kurdistan Blood Transfusion Center during a 6-month period. Blood pressure of donors is controlled by the physician two times with a 15-minute interval. Demographic data were collected through questionnaire and were analyzed by SPSS and Chi-square test.

 Results

 80.9% and 19.1% of the donor population were male and female respectively. Age average was 35.53 ± 11.19 years. Averages of systolic and diastolic blood pressures were 123.02 ± 13.23 mmHg and 77.35 ± 8.88 mmHg respectively. Isolated systolic hypertension was detected in 7.5% and isolated diastolic hypertension in 4.5% of blood donors. 3.4% had mild systolic and diastoic hypertension. There was a significant correlation between sex, age, education status, blood donation and systolic hypertension (p<0.05) and also between age, education status and diastolic hypertension (p<0.005) but there was no correlation between donation, sex and diastolic hypertension.

 Conclusions

 There was a low prevalence rate of hypertension in blood donors it can be attributed to blood donor population being young and middle aged, good attention in donor selection, and careful physical examination.

 Key words : Blood donor, Hypertension, Iran