1 in 5 Young Adults has High Blood Pressure

(Ivanhoe Newswire) — The number of young adults in the United States with high blood pressure may be much higher than previously reported, according to this study.

Researchers analyzed data on more than 14,000 men and women between 24 and 32 years old in 2008 from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They found 19 percent had elevated blood pressure, also referred to as hypertension. Only about half of the participants with elevated blood pressure had ever been told by a health-care provider that they had the condition.

"The findings are significant because they indicate that many young adults are at risk of developing heart disease, but are unaware that they have hypertension," Quynh Nguyen, a doctoral student at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and the study’s lead author, was quoted as saying. Hypertension is a strong risk factor for stroke and coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death for adults in the U.S.

Kathleen Mullan Harris, Ph.D., Add Health’s principal investigator, interim director of the UNC Carolina Population Center and a co-author of the paper believes that the high rate of hypertension among the study participants was surprising. Another "Our respective findings may differ, but the message is clear," said Harris. "Young adults and the medical professionals they visit shouldn’t assume they’re not old enough to have high blood pressure. This is a condition that leads to chronic illness, premature death and costly medical treatment.

"Our results show that the processes that trigger these problems begin early in life, but they are preventable, so it’s important to check for hypertension now and head it off at the pass, in order to avoid these health and societal costs later on," Harris said.

UNC researchers considered several possible explanations for the discrepancy between the Add Health and NHANES estimates, including differences in the characteristics of participants, where they were examined (at home vs. examination center) and the accuracy and reliability of the measured blood pressures. None of these factors, however, could account for the gap in the hypertension estimates between the two surveys.

Also notable was the Add Health finding that the number of young adults with elevated blood pressure was almost twice the number who reported being previously told by a health-care provider that they had hypertension (11 percent). Eric Whitsel, M.D., head of the study’s biology core, said that the finding was in line with expectations that measuring blood pressure will identify hypertension in otherwise healthy young adults who were unaware they had the condition. That pattern was reversed in NHANES, where the number of people found to have hypertension at the exam (4 percent) was half the number who reported a history of hypertension (9 percent).

The Add Health study also found males were much more likely than females to have hypertension (27 percent vs. 11 percent); and young adults without a high school degree were more likely than their college-educated peers to have the condition (22 percent vs. 17 percent).

SOURCE: Epidemiology, May 25 2011.