Many young women facing risky blood pressure, study finds

IT’S not just older men who need to ask their GP for a blood pressure check — overweight young women and teenage girls may also carry the silent risk factor putting them in danger of heart disease and stroke.

Young women should get their blood pressure checked, a new Royal Women’s Hospital study has found.

IT’S not just older men who need to ask their GP for a blood pressure check.

Overweight young women and teenage girls may also carry the silent risk factor, putting them at greater risk of early heart disease and stroke.

Victorian women as young as 16 are unknowingly recording high blood pressure, a new study has found, and being overweight or obese increases their risk.

The study, led by the Royal Women’s Hospital and University of Melbourne, recruited 639 Victorian females aged 16-25 via Facebook.

It found that almost 30 per cent of these women had blood pressure so high — between 120/80 and 139/89 — that this pre-hypertension was putting them at risk of early cardiovascular disease.

Lead author Dr Asvini ­Subasinghe, from the Women’s and Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, said the findings were surprising.

“You’re thinking about your weight for body image issues at that age, and what clothes you can fit into,” Dr Subasinghe said.

“High blood pressure is something you associate with middle age or elderly men.

“When young women go to the GP, they rarely have their blood pressure checked, or ask for it to be checked.

“But when your blood pressure is really high, your heart is working harder to pump blood everywhere, and it puts your body under stress.”

Dr Subasinghe said the good news was women could reduce their risk with lifestyle changes such as exercise.

“Girls also should be going to their GP and getting their blood pressure checked,” she said.

“We also need national guidelines on how to manage blood pressure for the younger demographic.”

The findings were published in the Journal of Human Hypertension. The research forms part of two ongoing studies into young women’s health: the Young Female Health Initiative and Safe-D.

The researchers are now following up these women two years later to see whether hypertension remained consistently high and if they had made any lifestyle changes.

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