New research has found that the impact of high blood pressure on life expectancy may be far more significant than previously thought.
According to the research, which was based on data from a long-running U.S. heart-health study, high blood pressure can take years off both life expectancy and time lived free of disease.
The researchers found that high blood pressure at the age of 50 cut off about 5 years of men's and women's lives, and also caused them to endure 7 more years with cardiovascular disease compared with their peers who had normal blood pressure in middle-age.
According to the authors, that high blood pressure increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and kidney failure, is well documented, but few studies have looked at how blood pressure affects life expectancy.
Dr. Oscar H. Franco, lead study author, says no one appears to have ever tried to quantify the effects of high blood pressure in terms of years spent with and without cardiovascular disease.
Franco, of Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands, says the current findings suggest that getting high blood pressure down to the normal range, or preventing it in the first place, could add disease-free years to people's lives.
They obtained their findings by using data from the Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948 and has collected decades of data on cardiovascular risk factors among more than 5,000 men and women.
The new analysis is based on 3,128 of those adults, who were monitored, on average, for nearly 28 years.
Franco's team found that men and women who had normal blood pressure at age 50 gained 7-plus years free of cardiovascular disease, compared with those who had high blood pressure when they were 50 years old.