"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."
"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. The fundamental issue is that people don't recognise that hypertension can be a childhood problem."
A national UK programme is being sought to monitor schoolchildren for high blood pressure because adolescent rates have nearly doubled in the past 20 years. No routine testing in the UK leaves clinicians unaware of how widespread the problem is and which children require intervention. Early detection of hypertensive teenagers would allow GPs to intervene and reduce the risk of organ damage and life-threatening cardiovascular disease in their 30s and 40s. Childhood hypertension increasingly reflects excess weight, poor nutrition and inactivity, and high blood pressure can damage organs for years before symptoms appear.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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