Odds increase with rapid rise in middle age
TUESDAY, May 10, 2016 (HealthDay News) — The overall pattern of blood pressure over time better predicts a patient’s risk of stroke or early death, according to a study published online May 9 in Hypertension.
Marileen Portegies, M.D., of the department of epidemiology at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues collected 20 years of data on the systolic blood pressure of 6,745 Dutch adults. Participants were ages 55 to 106 and living in a suburb of Rotterdam. The trial started in 1990, and five follow-up medical exams were conducted over two decades.
Those whose systolic blood pressure rose steeply from mid-life on and those whose high blood pressure dropped after age 65 had the highest risk of stroke or death from other blood pressure-related diseases up to age 80. Moderately high blood pressure was linked to the highest risk of stroke overall, but the lowest risk of death from heart attack, heart failure, and kidney disease. People with normal blood pressure that gradually increased had the lowest risk of stroke and a low risk of death from other causes, the researchers found.
This finding “further underlines the importance of treating people with a high blood pressure, even if it is only moderately elevated,” Portegies told HealthDay.
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