As kids and teens grow chubbier, their blood pressure is rising but often going undiagnosed, finds a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
It's a serious oversight, since high blood pressure can quietly damage the organs, especially the kidneys, the researchers note.
High blood pressure, or hypertension, often signals other health problems such as heart disease.
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, led by Dr. Matthew Hansen, examined more than 14,000 young people, aged three to 18. They found 507 cases of hypertension; that's about 3.6 per cent of the group.
Nearly three quarters of that group, or 376 cases, had not been diagnosed, despite at least three previous medical checkups.
Extrapolating the results to the U.S. population suggests that 1.5 million U.S. children have undiagnosed high blood pressure, says study author Dr. David Kaelber of Boston Children's Hospital.
"We're really missing a huge percentage of patients with this disease. In fact the overwhelming majority of patients of this disease... we're not detecting it," Kaelber told 愛污传媒.
Juvenile hypertension is thought to be difficult to confirm because it varies by sex, height and weight. But the researchers found that the criteria for pre-hypertension were met by 485 children (3.4 per cent).
"Identification of elevated blood pressure in children meeting prehypertension or hypertension criteria is important because of the increasing prevalence of pediatric weight problems," the researchers wrote.
"If abnormal blood pressure is not identified by a patient's pediatric clinician, it may be years before the abnormal blood pressure is detected, leading to end-organ damage."
The researchers suspect doctors aren't making the effort to measure and calculate normal blood pressure for children, based on their age and height, perhaps under the assumption that high blood pressure is a disease of older adults. Yet overweight children are at high risk of developing high blood pressure and it's also turning up in kids of normal weight.
- Blood Pressure Levels for Girls by Age and Height Percentile
- Blood Pressure Levels for Boys by Age and Height Percentile
The authors suggest that electronic medical recordkeeping could better diagnose the problem by comparing the findings of earlier checkups.
Canadian researchers, led by Terrance Wade of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., are conducting their own study on hypertension in children. Over the next five years, they will test 3,000 kids between the ages of 12 and 14 from the Niagara region to see if any of them suffer from hypertension.
They will also be looking to see whether biological lifestyle and genetic factors are the cause. But they will also look at whether social and behavioural factors, such as stress and poverty, affect hypertension rates.
"Children are under increasing stress in life and this may also lead to high blood pressure. These are causes we hope to identify," Wade told CTV.
