Close to 20% of young adults have high blood pressure, a new government-funded study reports.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill asked 14,000 men and women ages 24 to 32 about their history of high blood pressure and took blood pressure readings. The research was part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, dubbed Add Health, financed by the National Institutes of Health.
High blood pressure (hypertension) was defined as having a reading of 140/90 or higher. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a normal blood pressure is 120/80 or less. The researchers found that 19% of participants had high blood pressure.
"We were surprised by the figure," says Kathleen Mullan Harris, a principal investigator of the study and UNC professor of sociology. "Nobody really knows or had known what the prevalence was of high blood pressure among young adults."
The numbers, published online Wednesday in Epidemiology, are significantly higher than this from another large, ongoing health study, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which found that only 4% of adults 20-39 have high blood pressure.
The new results concern heart experts. "These statistics are certainly worrisome, since the prevalence of hypertension markedly increases with age," says Chip Lavie, medical director of Cardiac Rehabilitation and Prevention at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans.
"When we look at this increase in high blood pressure, I'm not surprised, because it's often associated with being overweight and obese," says Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. Steinbaum points to the rise of obesity in young people about 30% of young people are obese, she says.
"We've usually thought of this population as being healthy, and these are people who shouldn't be sick and they are," she says.
Young adults need to get moving and making healthier food choices, she says.
Steinbaum says you can't change some risk factors for heart disease, such as family history and age, but you can address others, including sedentary living, diet, stress, smoking and diabetes.
"Eighty percent of the time, heart disease is preventable," she says.
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