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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Men whose parents have hypertension may have to live with the condition themselves.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University first looked at 1,160 male medical students in 1947, then followed them for 54 years. Participants filled out annual questionnaires about their blood pressure, as well as their parents hypertension.
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At the start of the study, 23 percent of the medical students said they had at least one parent with hypertension. Over the years, that number increased to 60 percent and 14 percent had two parents with the disease. Results show men with one or both parents with hypertension had higher blood pressure at the beginning of the study and were more likely to develop hypertension at some point in their lives, compared to those whose parents never had the condition.
Researchers say if the parents had high blood pressure before age 55, their sons had a much higher risk of developing it too, especially at a younger age. When both parents had hypertension early, their sons had a 6.2-fold higher risk of ever developing the condition and a 20-fold higher risk of having high blood pressure by age 35.
Our findings emphasize the importance of asking patients about parental hypertension to identify those who are at high risk of developing hypertension, especially at a young age, for both population-based and individual-level interventions, the authors write. They also underscore the importance of primary prevention and blood-pressure monitoring early in life in men with parental hypertension, especially those who have a parent with early-onset hypertension.
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SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, 2008;168:643-648
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