Leading doctors have called for a national UK program to monitor schoolchildren for high blood pressure amid fears rising rates among teenagers will lead to more cases of organ damage, strokes and heart attacks.
High blood pressure indicators have has almost doubled among children over the past 20 yearsbut there is no routine testing in the UK, leaving doctors unaware of the scale of the problem and which children are most in need of help.
Identifying teenagers with high blood pressure will allow GPs to intervene early and reduce the risk of organ damage and potentially life-threatening cardiovascular disease as people reach high blood pressure. they are 30 and 40 years oldthe doctors said.
“We need to find out how serious the problem is, and that means finding a way to measure blood pressure in children who are still at school,” said Professor Manish Sinha, consultant pediatric nephrologist at the Evelina Children's Hospital in London, Guy's and St Thomas' Foundation Hospitals. National Health Service trust.
“The fundamental problem is that people don't realize that hypertension can be a childhood problem. We have an unhealthy child population, and hypertension puts them at greater risk for events like kidney disease, stroke and heart attack at an earlier age,” he added.
Almost a third of UK adults and half of US adults have hypertension. The prevalence rises sharply with age as blood vessels naturally thicken and become stiff, and most people over 65 have the condition. In addition to age and genetics, poor diets, especially those high in salt, lack of physical activity, being overweight or obese, drinking too much alcohol and smoking are all contributors to this.
In young children, high blood pressure is mostly caused by other medical problems, such as heart defects, kidney disease, genetic disorders, or hormonal problems. But increasingly, doctors are seeing cases associated with excess weight, poor diet and lack of exercise.
High blood pressure can wreak havoc on the body for many years before a person develops symptoms. Excessive pressure can cause aneurysms, or bulges in weak arteries, which can rupture and be fatal. Overloading the heart can lead to heart failure.
Dr Emily Haseler, who studies childhood hypertension at King's College London, said rising cases would place an additional burden on the NHS and harm UK productivity as more working-age people suffer the consequences of high blood pressure.
Monitoring could be included in the national child measurement program, which records height and weight at the end of primary school, or a new NHS health check during adolescence, she said. This would allow doctors to diagnose hypertension early so it can be treated and show how common the disease is.
Alternative approaches may include targeted blood pressure screening for children known to be at high risk, such as those with a family history of being born prematurely or being overweight.
“We need to start looking at this to understand the scale of the problem and start thinking about what to do,” said Professor Igor Rudan, co-director of the Center for Global Challenges. Health at the University of Edinburgh. “We need to know whether these children become adults who have heart attacks and strokes in their thirties.”
Hypertension is the leading cause of premature death in the UK. It is rarely used before people reach 40 or 50, but trends are changing. Juliet Bouverie, Executive Director Iron The association said there had already been an “alarming surge” in strokes among working-age people.
“The digital age has brought about changes in how children spend their time that we have not seen in human history,” Rudan said. “Traditionally, children played with each other outside as much as possible, but now parents simply provide them with a screen. It's a complete shift in the way children live.
“The combination of inactivity due to digital devices and poor nutrition means we are seeing many children who are obese and they have hypertension at eight times the rate of other children,” he said.
But children may be easier to help than older people. “The kids have a lot more opportunities to get them back on track,” Rudan said.
Research from Canada shows that hypertension in children and adolescents increases with From 1.3% in the 1990s to 6% in the 2010s.. Twice as many people have prehypertension, or high blood pressure. The health impact is dramatic: a study of more than 25,000 adolescents with hypertension found that over a 14-year follow-up period they were at increased risk of kidney disease or failure three times higher than in adolescents with healthy blood pressure.
Professor Ian Wilkinson, honorary consultant physician at the University of Cambridge and president of the British and Irish Hypertension Society, said tackling high blood pressure early could give people many more years of healthy life. “What we do now is wait until people reach 40 or 50 years old, wait until their blood pressure rises, and then treat them,” he said. “We ignore the youth.”
He advocates for high school blood pressure monitoring and wants marketers to create positive public health messages aimed at reducing salt intake and obesity.
“We measure height and weight, we give vaccinations for various diseases, so why don’t we deal with hypertension?” – he said. “A third of adults in the UK have hypertension and a significant proportion of this is likely to be caused by obesity. This is a national health emergency.”
Bouverie said it's concerning that more children and teenagers have high blood pressure because it accounts for about half of all strokes. “Childhood is an opportunity to teach and establish healthy lifestyle habits, such as regular exercise and a balanced diet,” she said. “All of these help reduce the risk of stroke, both now and in the future. Without these healthy habits, the body can accumulate problems for later in life and increase the chances of a person of any age having a stroke.”
