Jane23
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 Posted: 08/25/07 - 07:17 Post subject: High Blood Pressure Affects Children Too |
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American children are widely becoming fatter. Along with increase in obesity comes high blood pressure that unfortunately goes undiagnosed in 74% of the cases. Not properly diagnosed hypertension in childhood may eventually lead to organ failure and other health problems, like coronary artery disease, in adulthood.
It has been estimated that there are around two million children and teens as young as 3 years old in U.S. that have trouble with high blood pressure but like said not all of them are properly diagnosed.
The biggest problem with diagnosis hypertension in children is that it could be affected by many factors such as height, age and sex. However, there are risk factors that could be indicating which child may be susceptible to the disorder. These risk factors include the child's family history as hypertension is 50% heritable, low birth weight, being overweight, being diagnosed with congenital heart disease , longer than usual postpartum hospital stays and whether the child’s been breastfed in infancy.
Health experts are suggesting that a software program should be made to analyze factors such as previous high blood pressure readings, height, weight and sex and calculate children's risk of high blood pressure.
In the meantime, parents could help the rate of diagnosis by asking the doctor to check their child's blood pressure regularly, along with weight and height if risk factors are present.
Today, between 2% and 5% of U.S. children and teens are hypertensive, in comparison to 26% of adults. Around 1.5 million of the youngsters don't know they have high blood pressure, it has been estimated. |
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