Health experts have called adolescents to avoid salty diets, warning that such diets were capable of causing hypertension (高血压), as they grow older. The experts, who spoke in Lagos during cardiovascular (心血管的) grass root programme organised by Chike Okoli Foundation in collaboration with Lagos State Ministry of Education for over 1,000 senior secondary students (SSS) of Dairy Farm Senior Secondary School, Lagos, also urged adolescents to be mindful of their lifestyles as whatever they do today have future implications on their heart.
    The grass root programme is an annual event aimed to educate, create awareness and screen students in secondary school of heart related diseases in memory of Chike Okoli, who died at the age of 25 of cardiovascular disease. This year, the programme is targeting over 10,000 students in Lagos public schools.
    Public health physician and resident doctor at the university of Lagos Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Dr Idiakhoa Iyare, who was one of the guest lecturers for the programme, said the importance of the cardiovascular grass root programme could not be over emphasised as exposing young ones to implications of their lifestyles would save them from deaths and sufferings that could result from future cardiovascular diseases. "If we call hypertension a silent killer, it means that it is going to be silent for along time," Iyare said. " But if we could make the children get aware earlier and start focusing on healthy ways of living while they are much younger, it would be easier for them to modify their habits while they are young."
    Programme Coordinator of Chike OkoliFoundation, Mrs. Beaty Alfred, said that the programme was important to raise the health status of students in Lagos schools because "we believe that they are ignorant of the implications of some of their lifestyles," adding that "we want to catch them young."
The students were taken through series of lectures on the causes, implications and how to avoid hypertension by various experts from LUTH. Blood pressures of the students were also measured. Iyare added that hypertension is different from high blood pressure, which could arise from increased activities. The public health physician said:"Hypertension is a persistently elevated blood pressure. That means that the blood pressure is greater than 140-millimetre mercury systolic blood pressure and greater than 90-millimetre mercury diastolic blood pressure."