Adequate sleep tied to reduced risk for hypertension among adolescents
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Key takeaways:
- Adolescents with healthy sleep patterns had a significantly lower risk for developing hypertension.
- There was no significant association between neighborhood environmental noise and hypertension incidence.
Adequate sleep was associated with a significantly reduced risk for hypertension among adolescents, independent of environmental noise exposure, according to findings published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
“Insufficient or poor-quality sleep has been linked to adverse health outcomes, including obesity and hypertension in adults,” Augusto César F. De Moraes, PhD, MSc, assistant professor in the department of epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health in Austin, and colleagues wrote. “Despite these associations, the specific mechanisms by which sleep health influences BP in adolescents requires further exploration.
“[Additionally,] while the impact of environmental noise on adult health has been widely studied, there is a lack of research focusing on its effects on pediatric populations, particularly hypertension,” the researchers wrote. “Given the importance of sleep health and environmental noise in influencing cardiovascular outcomes, it is crucial to investigate their combined effects on pediatric hypertension.”
To examine the individual and joint effects of neighborhood environmental noise and sleep health on incidence of hypertension among adolescents, De Moraes and colleagues analyzed data from 3,320 Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study participants (mean age, 14 years; 48% female; 56% white) with complete data on Fitbit-tracked sleep, BP, height, neighborhood noise and relevant covariates.
Participants were recruited across 21 U.S. cities and followed from 2018-2020 to 2020-2022.
The study outcome was incidence of hypertension, which the researchers defined as systolic or diastolic BP in the 95th percentile or higher for age and height.
Sleep health was measured by daily sleep duration and categorized into three levels: healthy (age-appropriate optimal range, 9 to 12 hours), moderately healthy (< 1 hour above or below optimal range) and low ( 1 hour below or above optimal range).
The researchers used ZIP code data to categorize neighborhood noise exposure into tertiles based on median nighttime anthropogenic noise levels.
De Moraes and colleagues observed that incidence of hypertension increased from 1.7% (95% CI, 1.4-2.1) in 2018-2020 to 2.9% (95% CI, 2.4-3.6) in 2020-2022.
“This increase underscores the dynamic nature of hypertension development during adolescence, a critical period marked by significant physiological and behavioral changes,” the researchers wrote. “The rising incidence highlights the need for early identification and continuous BP monitoring in youth to implement timely and effective interventions.”
Additionally, they found that adolescents with healthy sleep had a lower risk for developing hypertension (RR = 0.63; 95% CI, 0.25-0.82) vs. those with moderately healthy (RR = 0.96; 95% CI, 0.58-1.6) and low healthy (RR = 1) sleep.
Although increased noise exposure was correlated with a higher risk for hypertension among adolescents, especially when combined with poor sleep health, the researchers did not find a significant association between neighborhood environmental noise and incidence of hypertension.
“This result suggests that while environmental noise is known to disrupt sleep, its direct impact on BP may be less pronounced in this age group,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers acknowledged that one limitation of their study was the exclusion of repeated BP measurements for accurate diagnosis of hypertension, resulting in the classification of participants with high BP instead.
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