High Midlife Blood Pressure Raises Your Risk of Heart Attacks and Stroke

There's one simple test you can take to reduce your risk of stroke or heart attack – get your blood pressure tested. Researchers have found that people who maintain or reduce their blood pressure to normal levels by age 55 have the lowest risk of cardiovascular disease. But people whose blood pressure had increased by that age have a higher lifetime risk – as much as 69 percent.

A study just published in Circulation: The Journal of the American Heart Association used data from more than 61,000 people who took part in the Cardiovascular Lifetime Risk Pooling Project. Researchers looked at how changes in blood pressure at midlife affect lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease.

Some of the findings:

• Almost 70 percent of men who developed high blood pressure in middle age will have a heart attack or stroke by the age of 85
• Women who develop high blood pressure by early middle age (around 41) have a higher lifetime risk of heart attack or stroke than women who have normal blood pressure up to the age of 55
• Women generally have greater increases in blood pressure in middle age than men
• At the age of 55, about one in four men and two out of five women had normal blood pressure but nearly half of both men and women had pre-hypertension
• The lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease was higher among blacks than whites of the same gender and increased as blood pressure rose at middle age

Normal blood pressure is defined by the National Institutes of Health as systolic pressure (the top number) of less than 120 and diastolic pressure (the bottom number) of less than 80. Pre-hypertension is a systolic pressure of 120 to 139 or a diastolic pressure of 80-89. There are two stages of hypertension or high blood pressure.  Stage 1 us a systolic pressure  of 140 to 159 or a diastolic pressure of 90-99. Stage 2 is a systolic pressure of 160 or above or a diastolic pressure of 100 or above.

When the systolic or diastolic numbers fall into different categories, the higher category is used to classify the blood pressure level.