The finding, reported in the Oct. 25 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, comes from nationally representative health data analyzed by two University of Illinois at Chicago researchers.
Youfa Wang, an assistant professor of human nutrition and Qiong Joanna Wang, a biostatistician at UIC's School of Public Health, analyzed data collected for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 1999-2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The Wangs found that more than half of all adults surveyed (58.2 percent) had blood pressure readings that placed them into the categories of either hypertension or prehypertension, a new, lower-threshold designation set last year in the Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure, known as JNC7.
Prehypertension is indicated by systolic/diastolic readings of between 120/80 and 139/89. If either the systolic or diastolic blood pressure falls within this range, it indicates prehypertension. Hypertension remains defined as 140/90 or above in the JNC7 classifications.
The Wangs used data collected from 4,805 adults age 18 or older. They analyzed the group by age, sex, body weight group, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, as determined by education. They also analyzed awareness of hypertension and efforts taken to control it, based on questions asked of survey participants.
The most pronounced prevalence of either prehypertension or hypertension was: among non-Hispanic blacks (63 percent), especially men (69 percent); among all those surveyed age 60 and over (88 percent); among those with less than a high school education (65 percent); and among those with body-mass indexes over 30, which indicates obe
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Contact: Paul Francuch
francuch@uic.edu
312-996-3457
University of Illinois at Chicago
25-Oct-2004