Occupational Medicine & Health Affairs
Open Access

Abstract

Stress is one of the major health hazards culminating into hypertension among farming households whose daily farming operations are carried out with crude implements under some primitive production technologies. This paper seeks to analyze the linkages between hazard exposure, stress and reported hypertension among farmers in south western Nigeria. Data was collected with structured questionnaires from 264 farmers that were randomly selected from Ogun and Oyo states. Data was analyzed with descriptive statistics and Seemingly Unrelated Bivariate Probit Regression (SUBPR) was used to analyze the covariates of stress exposure and reported hypertension due to endogeneity of the former in the estimated models. The results show that 81.06% of the farmers were males, while average age was 50.36 years. Also, 80.68% of the farmers indicated that they do go through one form of stress or the other, while majority traced stress to farming activities (37.12%) and financial problems (29.55%). General body pains (39.77%) and lower back pains (25.38%) were mostly reported. Stress management option that was mostly used was going to church (34.09%), while 35.98% indicated that they were aware of the association between stress and hypertension. The results of SUBPR showed that the model produced a good fit for the data given the statistical significance of Wald statistics (p<0.01) and Likelihood-ratio test of the rho (p<0.05). Probability of reporting hypertension significantly increased (p<0.10) with stress exposure, formal education, reported water borne disease among household members and recent death of household members, but reduced with income. Also, probability of experiencing stress increased significantly (p<0.10) with reported occupation-related pains, household size, farmers� income, ownership of house and exposure to resentment at home, but reduced with farmers age and loss of job. It was concluded efforts to reduce associated pains from farming with reduce stress which would reduce incidence of hypertension among farmers.

Biography

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