Higher body mass index associated with higher blood pressure

Study finds positive correlation between body mass index and blood pressure

More your body mass index, more likely are you to be prone to hypertension.

An ongoing study has found that body mass index is positively associated with blood pressure. The study of 1.7 million Chinese men and women is being conducted by researchers at the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) and in China. These findings appear in the issue of JAMA Network Open.

Researchers observed an increase of 0.8 to 1.7 mm Hg (kg/m2) in blood pressure per additional unit of body mass index

In individuals who were not taking an antihypertensive medication, the researchers observed an increase of 0.8 to 1.7 mm Hg (kg/m2) in blood pressure per additional unit of body mass index (BMI). Overall, the population had a mean BMI of 24.7 and a mean systolic blood pressure of 136.5, which qualifies as stage I hypertension according to American Heart Association guidelines. BMI is a measure of obesity, measured as the ratio of the weight and height square.

Researchers recorded the participants’ blood pressure from September 2014 through June 2017 as part of the larger China Patient-Centered Evaluative Assessment of Cardiac Events (PEACE) Million Persons Project. It captures at least 22,000 subgroups of people based on age (35-80), sex, race/ethnicity, geography, occupation, and other pertinent characteristics — such as whether or not they are on antihypertensive medication.

“The enormous size of the dataset — the result of an unprecedented effort in China — allows us to characterize this relationship between BMI and blood pressure across tens of thousands of subgroups, which simply would not be possible in a smaller study,” explained George Linderman, first author and doctoral candidate at Yale.

“If trends in overweight and obesity continue in China, the implication of our study is that hypertension, already a major risk factor, is likely to become even more important,” said Harlan Krumholz, M.D., the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Cardiology, director of CORE, and senior author on the study. “This paper is ringing the bell that the time is now to focus on these risk factors.”