Exclusive: Identifying teenagers at risk could help prevent organ damage, strokes and heart attacks in early adulthood, doctors say
Leading doctors have called for a national UK programme to monitor schoolchildren for high blood pressure amid concerns that rising rates in adolescents will increase cases of organ damage, strokes and heart attacks.
Rates of high blood pressure have nearly doubled among children in the past 20 years, but no routine testing is performed in the UK, leaving doctors in the dark about the extent of the problem and which children need most help.
Identifying teenagers with high blood pressure would enable GPs to intervene early and reduce the risk of organ damage and potentially life-threatening cardiovascular disease as people reach their 30s and 40s, doctors said.
“We need to find out how bad the problem is, and that means finding a way to measure blood pressure in children who are still at school,” said Prof Manish Sinha, a consultant paediatric nephrologist at the Evelina London children’s hospital, Guy’s & St Thomas’s foundation hospitals NHS trust.
