A recent study has shown that having high blood pressure or hypertension in teenage years can damage your heart which will become worse as an adult. Scientists from the University of Bristol in the UK and the University of Eastern Finland want to raise awareness about this issue and are encouraging young people to take care of their blood pressure levels soon to avoid any long-term health problems.
Blood pressure and hypertension are often called ‘silent killer diseases’. They can damage the kidneys, heart, blood vessels, and brain, putting people’s lives in danger. Every year governments and health services have to pay billions of dollars in order to help people affected by these diseases. Many people suffer from heart attacks or strokes due to their high blood pressure.
Different groups classify high-normal or hypertension measurements of your blood pressure differently. The European Society of Cardiology and the European Society of Hypertension say that a BP measurement of 130/85 mmHg is high-normal, while 140/90 mmHg is seen as hypertension. But the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association say that 130/80 mmHg is considered to be hypertension.
This year, the United States Preventive Services Task Force said that there isn’t enough proof to show if it is a good thing or bad thing to check for high blood pressure in kids and teens. So, at the moment, we don’t know if it will help them or not.
Last year (2022), researchers reported that having high blood pressure in childhood might lead to an early death later in life, in your 40s. However, it is still not known when high blood pressure actually starts damaging people’s hearts between kids and teens.
We don’t really know if having high blood pressure (over 130/85 mmHg) can cause premature heart damage in young people because we haven’t done enough tests on echocardiography.
This study was done with 1,856 teenagers, which included 1,011 girls. They were 17 when this research began and it followed them for seven years until they were 24. At the start and end of the experiment, researchers checked their blood pressure and any damage to their heart.
If your heart gets damaged, there are two main parts that will be affected: structure and function. Signs of damage to the structure are an enlarged left ventricle and thicker walls around it. As for the function, you may notice decreased performance from the left ventricle and higher pressure when it tries to fill up with blood.
Within seven years, twice the amount of teens were diagnosed with high blood pressure and heart problems. After looking at factors such as body fat, muscle mass, smoking status, physical activity, and family history of cardiovascular disease using adult cut off points for diagnosing heart damage, scientists saw that high blood pressure was causing premature heart damage in both boys and girls.
For both boys and girls, having high blood pressure or hypertension can cause harm to the heart. In males, this risk is generally around 10-30% higher than normal and may lead to damage of its functioning but not the structure.
Girls with higher blood pressure are more likely to have damage to their heart’s structure and function, which can be up to 2 times more likely.
Recent findings show that high blood pressure and hypertension can seriously damage the heart of young people. We should not delay any longer in starting blood pressure screenings for teens, because doing so could help prevent a lot of potentially premature deaths. To help spread awareness about the dangers posed by high blood pressure and hypertension, it is important for public health experts, pediatricians, caregivers, policy makers and journalists to take action. In addition, we should also make legislative changes to enforce blood pressure screening among adolescents. This would lower the amount of hypertension-related emergencies during their adulthood. An expert on this topic, Andrew Agbaje from the University of Eastern Finland said this.
According to the “Elevated Blood Pressure and Worsening Cardiac Damage During Adolescence”, written by Andrew O. Agbaje MD, MPH, which is published in The Journal of Pediatrics on 3 March 2023, elevated blood pressure can cause damage to your heart during your teenage years.
Dr Agbaje’s research group (urFIT-child) is funded by several foundations, such as the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation Central Fund, the Finnish Cultural Foundation North Savo Regional Fund, the Orion Research Foundation sr, The Aarne Koskelo Foundation, The Antti and Tyyne Soininen Foundation, The Paulo Foundation, The Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, The Paavo Nurmi Foundation, The Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research, and The Foundation for Pediatric Research.
