ABSTRACT
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. 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. 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. 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