Blood pressure and fibrinogen responses to mental stress as predictors of incident hypertension over an 8-Year period.
Andrew Steptoe
Mika Kivimaki
Gordon Lowe
Ann Rumley
Mark Hamer
2134/22266
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Blood_pressure_and_fibrinogen_responses_to_mental_stress_as_predictors_of_incident_hypertension_over_an_8-Year_period_/9625400
Background Heightened blood pressure (BP) responses to mental stress predict raised BP levels over subsequent years, but evidence for associations with incident hypertension is limited, and the significance of inflammatory responses is uncertain.
Purpose We investigated the relationship between BP and plasma fibrinogen responses to stress and incident hypertension over an average 8-year follow-up.
Method Participants were 636 men and women (mean age 59.1 years) from the Whitehall II epidemiological cohort with no history of cardiovascular disease and hypertension. They
performed standardized behavioral tasks (color/word conflict and mirror tracing), and hypertension was defined by clinic
measures and medication status.
Results Of participants in the highest systolic BP reactivity tertile, 29.3 % became hypertensive over the follow-up period
compared with 16.5 % of those in the lowest tertile, with an odds ratio of 2.02 (95 % CI 1.17–3.88, p =0.012) after adjustment for age, sex, grade of employment, body mass index, smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, follow-up time, subjective stress response, perceived task difficulty, perceived task engagement, and baseline BP. Similar associations were observed for diastolic BP reactivity (odds ratio 2.05, 95 % CI 1.23–3.40, p = 0.006) and for impaired systolic BP post-stress recovery (odds ratio 2.06, 95 % CI 1.19–3.57,
p =0.010). Fibrinogen reactions to tasks also predicted future hypertension in women (odds ratio 2.64,95 % CI 1.11–6.30, p=0.029) but not men.
Conclusions These data suggest that heightened cardiovascular and inflammatory reactivity to mental stress is associated
with hypertension risk, and may be a mechanism through which psychosocial factors impact on the development of hypertension.
2016-08-15 10:09:56
Stress reactivity
Stress recovery
Allostatic load
Inflammation
Education
Medical and Health Sciences not elsewhere classified