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Blood pressure and fibrinogen responses to mental stress as predictors of incident hypertension over an 8-Year period.
journal contribution
posted on 2016-08-15, 10:09 authored by Andrew Steptoe, Mika Kivimaki, Gordon Lowe, Ann Rumley, Mark HamerBackground 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.
Funding
This research was supported by the British Heart Foundation (RG/10/005/28296).
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Annals of Behavioral MedicineCitation
STEPTOE, A. ...et al., 2016. Blood pressure and fibrinogen responses to mental stress as predictors of incident hypertension over an 8-Year period. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 50(6), pp.898-906.Publisher
© Springer VerlagVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-07-11Publication date
2016-07-11Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Springer under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
1532-4796Publisher version
Language
- en