Is overall and abdominal adiposity associated with increased blood pressure and hypertension in an adult Indian population?
Overall and abdominal adiposity are consistently and linearly associated with increased blood pressure and higher odds of hypertension in adult Indians, independent of age.
To assess the relationship and consistency of overall and abdominal obesity on blood pressure in adult Indian population using cross-sectional descriptive design collected height, weight, circumferences of waist and hip, systolic blood pressure (BP) and diastolic BP besides the information on demographic variables from 303 males + 357 females (untreated for hypertension) between 21-60 years. Men were found to have higher abdominal obesity (0.90±0.07) than women (0.84±0.08) (p25 kgm-2. Adjustment for age, decreased the odds of hypertension in males and increased in females in the BMI category of >25 kgm-2, while no change in the remaining quartiles. These findings suggest consistent linear relation of adiposity with BP, independent of age.
Reddy et al. (2010) studied this question.