Stroke risk rises with every year of unchecked high blood pressure, here’s why managing it early could save your life. On the contrary, delaying the onset of high blood pressure lowers the risk of a stroke, new research suggests.
Stroke & blood pressure: what the researchers found
This study was published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. The researchers found that the longer participants had high blood pressure, the greater their risk for stroke was. Accordingly, the greater their need for blood pressure-lowering medications. Stroke risk was found higher regardless of treatments applied.
“So much of the effort to prevent stroke has focused on blood pressure treatment,” said the study’s lead author Dr. George Howard, an emeritus distinguished professor of biostatistics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “While that’s an incredibly important thing to do, we need to shift attention back to efforts to prevent high blood pressure from ever developing.”
Many people don’t realize their blood pressure is too high because there often aren’t any symptoms. The new study followed 27,310 adults in the U.S. for a median of 12.4 years. Their average age was 65.
Stroke & blood pressure: medications, years, risk
The longer someone lives with hypertension, the more classes of high blood pressure medications they need to take. People who had hypertension for 21 years or more were taking 2.28 classes of drugs on average compared to 1.68 classes of medication for those who’d had hypertension for five years or less.
Stroke risk also rose as the years of living with hypertension added up. It was registered even after researchers adjusted for factors that could have affected the findings. Such factors include whether participants reported using medications to control their high blood pressure.
People who had hypertension for up to five years were 31% more likely to have a stroke than people without the condition. Those who had it for six to 20 years were 50% more likely to have a stroke, and those who had hypertension for more than two decades were at 67% greater risk for a stroke than participants with normal blood pressure.
Significance of the findings
The new findings magnify the urgency of identifying and managing any blood pressure issues early – before hypertension develops, said Dr. Shawna Nesbitt, medical director at Parkland Health’s Hypertension Clinic and a professor in the department of internal medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, both in Dallas.
“It’s the duration of exposure to this high pressure that is damaging,” said Nesbitt, who was not involved in the study.
Preventing strokes as a consequence of prolonged hypertension could reap a wealth of benefits that extend beyond an individual’s health, she said.
“The cost of a stroke is incredibly high,” Nesbitt said. “It can cause disability that is lifelong. Treating and controlling blood pressure earlier saves more than the cost of treatment; it prevents the disability that is incurred by people who have strokes and the subsequent loss of quality of life, often including their ability to work. It’s the long-term care following a stroke that really affects people and their families.”
