ABSTRACT

 The issue of high blood pressure still remains a burden to the world. Nigeria government has recorded very little achievement in the treatment, prevention and management of high blood 9 pressure because of inadequate knowledge of the trend pattern of high blood pressure. Thus the study was to develop a stationary time series model suitable for high blood pressure data at Federal Medical Centre Owerri. The data for this work were secondary data collected from the Medical Record Department of Federal Medical Centre Owerri and cove's the period January 2004 to December 2011. Box and Jenkins method of time series was employed as a tool for the analysis. The trend was estimated which indicates an upward long term movement of high blood pressure in the hospital. Plots of autocorrelation function and partial autocorrelation function of the differenced data were used to identify a stationary model for the data. By the use of statistical soilwar called MINITAB, an Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was ii{ed and diagnostic checking was done using Q statistics to check the adequacy of the lttc model. Forecast values were also made for the Period of 24 months (2 years). It was revealed ihat monthly cases of high blood pressure at Federal Medical Centre Owerri, have no seasonal influence. As such the study recommends that Government should provide enabling environment and the necessary drugs needed for fight against high blood pressure.