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75% of Children With Hypertension Are Undiagnosed

Posted: Thursday, August 23, 2007

High blood pressure is something you may not associate with children, but some kids do have it, and it can mean serious health problems.

A new study says pediatricians need to pay more attention to this issue, because there are likely about a million children in the U.S. who have high blood pressure, but whose doctors have not diagnosed it.

The way that normal and abnormal blood pressures are defined for children is it’s based on their gender, it’s based on their height percentile, and it’s also based on their age. So the challenge here is that there’s literally hundreds of normal and abnormal blood pressure values for children.

The major finding of the study was that only approximately one quarter of all children with hypertension, have been identified by their pediatric provider, and if we were to extrapolate these figures to a national level, this would mean that over one million children in the United States who have high blood pressure, have not been identified by their pediatric provider.

We knew which children had high blood pressure and then we compared that to the diagnoses that were in the electronic medical record to see which of those children had their pediatric providers figured out that they had high blood pressure.

It really speaks to the future of research in general with an electronic medical record because here we have seven years of data that I was really able to look at and analyze in a relatively short period of time.

Source: Diabetes In Control: JAMA.2007;298 (8):874-879