Washington – The rate of health-threatening high blood pressure has started rising among America’s children for the first time in decades, researchers reported Monday, a trend long feared by experts worried about the consequences of the obesity epidemic.
After dropping steadily since the 1960s, diagnoses of early hypertension and full blown high blood pressure began creeping up among children and adolescents in the late 1980s , according to an analysis of data collected from nearly 30,000 youths by seven federal surveys.
Although the increases have been small – 1 percent for early hypertension and 2.3 percent for full-blown hypertension – they translate into hundreds of thousands more children developing what often becomes a chronic, lifelong condition. Long considered primarily an affliction of the middle-aged and elderly, high blood pressure is a leading cause of a host of health problems, including heart attacks and strokes – the nation’s top killers.
With an adult form of diabetes already being diagnosed more frequently in children and more young people developing high cholesterol, the new finding is another indication that the obesity epidemic is spawning a generation at heightened risk for illnesses that struck their parents and grandparents only later in life, experts said.
“This is very worrisome,” said Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. “Typically in the past we didn’t begin to see high blood pressure until someone was in their 30s or 40s. This is another piece of evidence suggesting that the obesity epidemic will likely turn into a heart disease epidemic.”
The study will be published in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Circulation.
