 World Hypertension Day is celebrated annually on the 17th of May, but the sole aim of educating the public and increasing awareness of hypertension, which is also commonly known as high blood pressure. The day is organized by the World Hypertension League, WHL, which is an umbrella organization composed of 85 hypertension societies and leagues from all over the world to encourage people to regularly check their blood pressure. The theme for this year is Know Your Numbers and WHL would like to encourage as many people as possible to get involved in May measurement month, an initiative that started in 2017 with volunteers manning screening sites in the range of venues around the world to check the blood pressure of as many people as possible. And joining us on the news at this time to discuss this year's theme is a medical practitioner Dr. Ndubisi Igboichi. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Good evening. Okay. So for my first question, what would you say informed this year's theme, which is Know Your Numbers? I mean, this year's theme came a lot from the idea of wanting the general public, the general public to know their numbers, basically to know their blood pressure, you know, is just a way of making everyone aware of the idea of hypertension and getting their blood pressure checked as often as possible. Okay. Would you say that the awareness of hypertension is loud enough in Nigeria? It could be better. It could be better. You know, we are not where we used to be a few years ago, we are better now and we could only get better. So we need to do more awareness and we could do more education of the public. We are getting better. Okay. What exactly is the importance of monitoring blood pressure? Why is it so important for a person to monitor their blood pressure? It's very important to monitor blood pressure because hypertension is what we call a silent disease. Many people would have hypertension working around the streets and then they have no symptoms. So most people have hypertension having no symptoms and when you now start having symptoms and when it gets to a very critical situation, you know, when you start having complications, which is why it's good to get your blood pressure checked as often as possible so that you can know and you know, be able to manage it very early on to avoid complications arriving. Okay. So for the people that have hypertension, how do you think that they can manage hypertension? Manage hypertension generally starts from modifying your lifestyle. You know, physical exercise is very important. Your diet, you know, cutting down on salt is very important. Reducing alcohol intake is also very important. Reducing stressful activities. You know, we live in times where people are always very busy. So try to relax as much as possible. You know, doing all these and then your diets to contain lots of vegetables, lots of foods. So we as individuals can start by modifying our lifestyle. That's the first step to controlling hypertension. Okay. Thank you very much Dr Igboichi for joining us on the news at this time. Thank you. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.