Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- High blood pressure is the biggest preventable cause of early death in China, according to a study that calls on the nation’s health authorities to make fighting the condition their top priority.

More than 20 percent of all deaths in China were due to high blood pressure in 2005, and about 60 percent were linked to heart disease, a study of almost 170,000 people published in the latest edition of the medical journal The Lancet found. More than half of those fatalities were premature, said researchers led by Jiang He at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Encouraging China’s people to consume less salt should be a priority for health authorities, which tend to devote more resources to fighting infectious diseases, the authors wrote. More than a quarter of the world’s adults had high blood pressure in 2000, a number that may increase 60 percent by 2025, a previous study showed.

“The enormous mortality burden related to blood pressure that we have documented is striking and unexpected compared with previous estimates,” He and colleagues wrote. “Prompt action will save millions of lives each year.”

The researchers studied 169,871 people aged 40 years and older between 1991 and 2005. Almost 20,000 of the subjects died, including 11,000 who died prematurely. Based on those figures, the researchers said that more than 2.3 million deaths in China were attributable to high blood pressure in 2005, including 1.3 premature deaths.

The researchers may have underestimated deaths attributable to high blood pressure because cardiovascular disease is a more common cause of death in China now than in the 1990s, when the study was conducted, they said.

The research was funded by the American Heart Association, the U.S. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, China’s Ministry of Health and the nation’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simeon Bennett in Singapore at sbennett9@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 5, 2009 20:01 EDT