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Hypertension rate could be as high as 20% in young adults
Nguyen QC. Epidemiology. 2011;22: 532–541.
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New findings have revealed that rates of hypertension among young adults may be close to 20%, nearly five times the rate found among participants of NHANES.
Kathleen Mullan Harris, PhD, and colleagues performed the research by examining 14,252 participants from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), Wave IV study, and comparing them with participants from NHANES 2007-2008 (n=733). All individuals included in the comparison were aged between 24 and 32 years and had a blood pressure level of at least 140/90 mm Hg.
Overall, rates of hypertension were much higher for Add Health study participants (19% vs. 4%) even though self-reported history was only slightly higher (11% vs. 9%). Among participants with self-reported hypertension, approximately 50% of those in Add Health vs. 20% in NHANES actually had elevated BP by study measurement.
Adjustments for differences in participant characteristics, use of antihypertensive medications, examination time, as well as the consumption of food, caffeine and cigarettes before BP measurement had little influence on these estimates.
“The large and unexplained differences between Add Health and NHANES merit further investigation,” the researchers wrote. “US coronary heart disease mortality and policy models rely heavily on NHANES systolic BP distributions and, in some cases, on optimistic assumptions regarding relatively small decreases of 0–1 mm Hg per year in population mean systolic BP.”
Also meriting further scrutiny, they wrote, is the prevalence of hypertension found among Add-Health Wave-IV participants, indicating an unexpectedly high risk of cardiovascular disease among young adults in the United States.
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