By John Gever, Senior Editor
MedPage Today

In yet another study showing African-Americans with greater risk for disorders involving blood pressure, blacks without baseline hypertension developed the condition substantially faster than whites, according to health records for nearly 19,000 people.

Among adults of all ages initially with non-hypertensive pressures tracked via clinic records for up to seven years, the median time to a new diagnosis of hypertension was 626 days for blacks versus 991 days for whites (P<0.001) after adjusting for potential confounding factors, according to Anbesaw Selassie, DrPH, of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, S.C., and colleagues.

After adjusting for age, baseline blood pressure, sex, body mass index, and presence of chronic kidney disease or type 2 diabetes, blacks had a 35 percent greater likelihood of progressing to hypertension relative to whites (95 percent CI 30 percent to 40 percent), the researchers reported online in Hypertension.

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