Study reveals increased blood pressure during Covid-19 pandemic

The first year of the pandemic was difficult. Americans have faced a global pandemic, the loss of loved ones, lockdowns that have fragmented social networks, stress, unemployment and depression.

It’s probably not surprising that the country’s blood pressure has soared.

Scientists reported that blood pressure measurements of nearly 500,000 adults showed a significant increase in 2020 compared to the previous year.

This measurement describes the pressure of blood against the walls of the arteries. Over time, the increased pressure can harm the heart, brain, blood vessels, kidneys, and eyes. Sexual function can also be affected.

“These are very important data that are not surprising but shocking,” said Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, president of the American Heart Association, who was not involved in the study.

“Even small changes in the average blood pressure of the population,” he added, “can have a huge impact on the number of strokes. [acidente vascular cerebral]heart failure events and strokes that we are likely to see in the coming months.”

The study, published late last year as a research letter in the journal Circulation, is a stark reminder that even in the midst of a pandemic that has killed more than 785,000 Americans and hampered access to health care in general, chronic health conditions still need to be taken care of.

Nearly half of all American adults have hypertension, a chronic condition known as a “silent killer” because it can have fatal consequences, although it produces few symptoms.

Hypertension can also put people at greater risk of serious illness if they are infected with the coronavirus. (Evidence for this link is mixed, according to the US government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

The new study, conducted by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic and Quest Diagnostics, examined data from hundreds of thousands of employees and family members in wellness programs that monitored blood pressure and other health indicators, such as weight.

Participants, from all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, included people who had high blood pressure and others who had normal blood pressure at baseline.

“We observed that people weren’t exercising as much during the pandemic, they weren’t getting regular care, they were drinking more and sleeping less,” said Dr. Luke Laffin, lead author, preventive cardiologist and co-director of the Center for Blood Pressure Disorders at the Cleveland Clinic. “We wanted to know if their blood pressure was changing during the pandemic.”

The researchers found that blood pressure readings changed little from 2019 to the first three months of 2020, but increased significantly from April to December 2020, compared to the same period in 2019.

Blood pressure is measured in units of millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) and consists of two numbers. The first number refers to systolic pressure, when the heart contracts, and the second number refers to diastolic pressure, when the heart rests between beats. Normal blood pressure is believed to be 120/80 mm Hg (the so-called 12 over 8) or less, although there are decades of dispute over optimal levels.

The new study found that the average monthly change from April 2020 to December 2020, compared with the previous year, was 1.10 mm Hg to 2.50 mm Hg for systolic blood pressure and 0.14 to 0.53 for diastolic blood pressure.

The increases were real in men and women of all age groups. Greater increases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure were observed in women.

The average age of study participants was just over 45, and just over half of them were women. But critics said the failure to include information about participants’ race and ethnicity was a significant problem in the study, as hypertension is far more prevalent among black Americans than it is among whites or Hispanics.

Blacks have also been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Laffin said information about race and ethnicity was only available for 6% of study participants, so an analysis would not be meaningful.

But there’s a big difference between black Americans and white and Hispanic Americans when it comes to hypertension, said Kim Williams, a cardiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and author of the national blood pressure guidelines published in 2017.

“The hypertensive state has been epidemic in the African American population for decades,” he said. “Our therapies have improved and our attempt to bring attention to it has improved, but the gap is widening. And we know that the pandemic has hit different cultures and different aspects of society in different ways.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves