Abstract
Objective: Hypertension is the one of the most important risk factors of stroke and other lethal diseases. Thus, it is essential to prevent the onset of hypertension in preventive medicine. Further, with changes in the Japanese lifestyle, the risk factors for the onset of hypertension are assumed to have also been changing. To determine risk factors for the onset of hypertension, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of data from subjects who had undergone annual health screening in recent years.
Methods: Our subjects were 1,701 people who had undergone annual health screening every year from 2003 to 2008. We excluded 396 subjects who presented hypertension or were taking medication for it, and subjected the data of the remaining 1,305 subjects to multivariate Cox regression analysis.
Results: During the 5 years, 139 subjects started medication for hypertension and 78 subjects presented hypertension. After adjusting for covariate factors, the multivariate cox regression analysis showed that age, body mass index (BMI), 1st-year blood pressure (BP) and parent hypertension were significant and independent risk factors for the onset of hypertension. Changes in BMI over the 5 years were significantly relevant to changes in BP over this period (p<0.0001). BMI was also correlated with the incidence of hypertension over 5 years. Furthermore, excluding the data of 38 subjects taking medication for diabetes mellitus from the analysis showed that HbA1c was also a significant and independent risk factor for the onset of hypertension.
Conclusions: Recently, our knowledge of the harmful effects of obesity on health has been growing. Our study showed that obesity is a risk factor for onset of hypertension and therefore body weight control is important for preventing it.
