Social Media Use ,Online Health Information Seeking and Knowledge on Hypertension Among Undergraduate Students of Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (FMHS), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)

BACKGROUND Hypertension is a medical condition that acts as an important public health problem worldwide. It contributes to the disease which is mostly seen in primary health care settings such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, kidney failure, and premature death if it is not diagnosed as soon as possible. The World Health Organization (WHO) significantly mentions that an estimation of 1.13 billion people worldwide from poor countries where the healthcare system is weak have been detected with hypertension. Hypertension also puts an enormous financial pressure towards individuals and medical services via utilizing limited resources . Hypertension is predisposed to multiple factors. Such factors vary from country to country and there is also a disparity between urban and rural areas of the same location.

In Malaysia, 30% of adults above 18 have hypertension. Based on another study, it was proven that adults with uncontrolled hypertensive portrayed a higher risk of CVD mortality when compared to normotensive adults. It was reported that there were 3550 of them all caused hypertensive death and based on that 1027 are caused by cardiovascular disease; 771 are caused by heart-specific diseases and 256 by a cerebrovascular specific disease. However, untreated hypertension was stated to be the high risk of all caused death.

Based on a study by Grad I. et al, global knowledge on hypertension among adults is relatively low which is almost 49.2%. Whereas for medium knowledge on hypertension has 38% and only reported that 13% has higher knowledge on hypertension

. Besides, adults also have insufficient knowledge on epidemiology, method of treatment, and avoidance of hypertension(6).In addition, a good understanding of hypertension has also been linked with enhanced compliance with medications and good control of blood pressure.

According to Loiselle (1995), health information behavior is basically defined as a self-regulatory technique used by patients to coordinate transactions between self-related and health-related settings with the goal of balancing instrumental benefits and informative subjective costs. The students use electronic health knowledge to take some essential health-related decisions and actions. Students reported using the health details gathered more as a guide for lifestyle changes (72.4%) and the rest is dealing with healthcare practitioners online about the change in medication and guide of lifestyle changes.