A 25-year study of 11,000 individuals has confirmed that young men with high blood pressure are more likely to die from heart disease or other causes than those with normal blood pressure. These findings underscore the need to control hypertension even in young adults.

Hypertension has long been identified as a risk factor in middle-aged and older people. Because heart attacks and deaths from cardiovascular disease are rare in men younger than 50 and in women younger than 60, studying risk factors that appear early requires long-term follow-up. The Chicago Heart Association Detection Project in Industry did just that; researchers followed nearly 11,000 men aged 18 to 39 for an average of 25 years.

Just under 30% of the men had optimal or normal blood pressure at the beginning of the study, when the average age was 30, with 62% showing high-normal or stage 1 hypertension. The researchers commented that these findings reflect the adverse impact of dietary and other lifestyle traits leading to rises in blood pressure from youth onward. They found excess death rates among these men from heart disease as well as all other causes that translated to an estimated shorter life expectancy of 2 to 4 years.

The researchers call for increased population-wide prevention of increased blood pressure through healthy lifestyle habits and efforts to detect rising blood pressure in children, teenagers and young adults so that efforts to control blood pressure can be started early.

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