High Blood Pressure in Teenagers (Not Overweight)!
Many studies confirmed that overweight can increase the risk of hypertension (high blood pressure). Hypertension is often considered as a silent killer since it usually doesn’t cause any symptoms until it get worse and cause serious complications. In general, it is common in older adults and elderly people. But sometime it also can occur in teenagers (the age of 13 to 19, according to Wikipedia). Many hypertensive adolescents have obesity, but some haven’t.
Why does hypertension tend to occur in older adults than in teenagers?
Age is another risk factor of hypertension, in other words your risk increases as you get older. Almost all organ functions of the body decrease as you age, including your heart and blood vessels (two major parts of the body that significantly affect how your blood pressure (BP) fluctuates).
Even doctor can use the fluctuation of your BP as a reflection of how well your heart and arteries work. Just when you were born, you had the clearest blood vessels and good heart.
As you grow up and get older, there will be more bad deposits that can harm the health of your heart and arteries. The bad deposits can be fat and bad cholesterol (LDL) deposits. For more detailed information on how your risk of hypertension increases as you age, visit this section!
Why does overweight have a significant effect?
Overweight is linked to lots of medical health problems such as heart disease & other cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, high cholesterol, and hypertension.
More pounds of weight you gain higher than your healthy weight’s scale means more blood needed to be pumped by your heart. In other words, more fat you gain can make your heart work harder.
This can increase the volume of the blood that flow through your arteries – and as a result, your blood pressure can increase easier than when you are at your best and healthy weight’s scale.
Furthermore, obesity can indicate that there are more calories that you get than that you burn. This means you have lack of physical activity (poor in exercise).
Both obesity and lack of exercise (physical activity) can affect each other. And both problems are also the risk factors of hypertension. If you are overweight, see also how losing weight can significantly help reduce bad cholesterol and blood pressure in here!
What are causes of high blood pressure in teenagers without overweight?
Did you know that about 17 percent of all kids and teens experience obesity (according to a latest outline published by CDC ‘the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention’)?
While several decades ago hypertension is considered as ‘not childhood condition’. But the raised numbers of children and teenagers with obesity now change this perception – though hypertension is still more common in older adults!
Most hypertensive teenagers have obesity. This points that obesity may have a significant contribution in causing raised numbers of hypertension in children and teenagers! However, obesity doesn’t work alone.
Obesity is often associated with most common type of hypertension called primary or essential hypertension. And typically, primary hypertension occurs due to the combination of two or more lifestyle factors.
Some experts think that obesity may be the most significant risk factor in causing high blood pressure in kids and adolescents.
If they are not overweight, some of the following risk factors can put them at high risk of getting high blood pressure earlier:
