By Emmanuel T. Erediano
Variety News Staff

THE Department of Public Health says a study has disclosed that 37 percent of sophomore students in the CNMI have high blood pressures, 23 percent of them are obese and 17 percent are overweight.
Tayna Camacho, Public Health’s diabetes prevention and control coordinator, said this study is called Project 10 because the participants were limited to 10th grade students.
Forty-six percent of the respondents were Chamorro, 25 percent Filipinos, 5 percent Carolinians, and 12 percent from other ethnic groups.
Camacho said it is “bad that so many people this young have high blood pressure.”
The study also indicated that 10 percent of the teenagers have high blood sugar.
The number of risk factors among sophomore students was also found to be considerably high, with 64 percent of the respondents having three or more risk factors.
There are risk factors that cannot be avoided, Camacho said, like ethnicity and hereditary for example.
The study revealed that 78 percent of the sophomore students have family members with diabetes and 30 percent of them have mothers who had gestational diabetes which develops during pregnancy.
The risk factors that can be avoided are the ones related to lifestyle and eating habits.
The study showed that 49 percent admitted eating fastfood three to four days a week with 18 percent saying they do so almost every day.
It also showed that 46 percent of them drink soda three to four days a week; 29 percent drink soda five to seven days a week; 41 percent drink other high sugar drinks three to four days; and 43 percent do the same five to seven days a week.
Camacho said the number of risk factors can be reduced if people change their lifestyle and eating habits.
Taking the right amount of certain foods and exercising regularly helps a lot, she added.
The Commonwealth Health Center registry shows that the number of people diagnosed with diabetes is increasing.
From 500 in 1993, the number of patients with diabetes rose to about 3,500 in 2005.