Spouses shared hypertension
If a husband or wife suffers from hypertension, the other partner often has high blood pressure as well. This has been shown in a new international study in which scientists compared the blood pressure levels of almost 34,000 married couples from four countries.
The fact that spouses are similar not only in terms of interests and personality traits, but also diseases, is not news to doctors. However, studying such coincidences, experts usually limited themselves to a single country or took small regional samples.
Scientists from the University of Michigan and colleagues from several other research universities in the United States decided to expand the scope. In their paper, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, they compared blood pressure measurements of middle-aged and older heterosexual married couples from the United States (3,989 couples), England (1,086), and China (6,514) and India (22,389). Data were collected between 2015 and 2019, during longitudinal studies of aging conducted in the listed states.
"Our study is the first to examine the commonality of high blood pressure in married couples from high- and middle-income countries. The spouses often share similar interests, living conditions, daily habits and health indicators. We wanted to find out if many of them would also have the same tendency to hypertension," said the average age of the husbands in the study was 65.7 years in the United States, 74.2 years in England, and 61.5 and 57.2 years in China and India, respectively. Wives were on average several years younger.
The presence of hypertension was determined on the basis of blood pressure measurements at a single time point. Three measurements were performed by medical officers using automatic tonometers. Study participants were classified as hypertensive if their systolic blood pressure reached or exceeded 140 millimeters of mercury, or their diastolic blood pressure reached or exceeded 90 millimeters of mercury. The researchers also took into account if the participants reported a history of high blood pressure.
The findings revealed that commonality in terms of hypertension was seen in about 38% of the couples from the United States and 47% from England who were considered. Among Chinese and Indian couples, the prevalence of high blood pressure in both spouses was 20.8% and 19.8%, respectively.
Wives who were married to hypertensive husbands were more likely to have high blood pressure than wives whose spouses were not hypertensive. A similar correlation was observed among husbands. This correlation, which was more pronounced in China and India than in the US and England, persisted after the researchers adjusted for the area where the couples lived in each country, family wealth, length of marriage, age and education of the participants. a said one of the study authors Jithin Sam Varghese (Jithin Sam Varghese) from Emory University in Atlanta.
Although hypertension is more common in the United States and England, the study found a stronger association between blood pressure levels in couples in China and India. Researchers hypothesized that this could be partly explained by cultural differences between the nations. In Asian countries, family members tend to be more dependent on each other, so the mutual influence on health in a couple may be stronger.
The authors called their study important because the findings may be useful in developing clinical strategies to control hypertension, one of the common risk factors for cardiovascular disease. A couple-centered approach may be more effective than an individual approach.