My Healthy Heart Blogs
Borderline High Blood Pressure Increases Heart Risk
10/16/07
Disease Basics
Women at the upper end of normal blood pressure are at greater risk of becoming hypertensive and suffering significant heart disease events, according to a new study.
Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a known risk factor for heart disease events like heart attack. However, high normal blood pressure, or a blood pressure reading between 130/85 mm Hg and 139/89 mm Hg, was also proven to be a significant indicator of future heart disease events.
Almost 40,000 women were involved in the study. Each woman's blood pressure was designated normal, high normal, or high at the beginning of the study. Then, researchers followed each woman for an average of a little more than 10 years and recorded the incidence of cardiovascular death, heart attack, or stroke.
Only 2.5 percent of the women in the study suffered a major cardiac event. However, nearly one-third of the women who did not have high blood pressure at the start of the study developed hypertension by the end. Of those women, those who became hypertensive within the first two years of the study had a noticeably higher cardiovascular risk than those who maintained normal blood pressure. Also, women with high normal blood pressure who became hypertensive experienced similar outcomes to the group initially classified as hypertensive.
The study was published in BMJ (British Medical Journal) and is the abstract is accessible on PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.
