Blood Pressure Guidelines for Children

A change of lifestyle or a sudden increase of a child's weight can make it necessary for parents to monitor their child's blood pressure as early as three years old. Even infants can develop high blood pressure, which may pose serious complications to the child such as heart disease or the onset of stroke.

Facts

• There are certain guidelines in the United States for determining whether a child has high blood pressure. These guideline are frequently updated depending on the country's policies for taking care of children with hypertension. In 2004, Houston's University of Texas implemented new guidelines that included reading blood pressure in children from three years old and up during routine hospital visits. Moreover, the new guidelines include revised blood pressure classifications, a guide to evaluating high blood pressure in children and a description on how to detect organ damage in children.

Hypertension in Children

• A study in JAMA, which included a population of 5,582 children, shows that hypertension in children is constantly increasing based on surveys conducted from 1988 to 1994 and 1999 to 2000. Blood pressure recorded in the 1999 to 2000 survey is 1 and 2.9 mmHg higher than in the first survey performed from 1988 to 1994. This illustrates the impact posed by the change in lifestyle, diet and physical activities among children from the late 1980s up to recent years.

Blood Pressure Classification

• The scale for determining hypertension in children is measured in percentiles, similar to how pediatricians measure IQ ranking. The updated blood pressure tables include the 50th, 95th and 99th percentiles. The 50th percentile was created in order to measure the midpoint of the normal blood pressure range, while the 95th percentile measures the above-average point of hypertension among children. Lastly, the 99th percentile is the highest point of hypertension.

Therapy

• The new guidelines mentioned above also detail methods of therapy for children with high blood pressure. Normotensive, or children with normal blood pressure, are still encouraged to take up physical activities, maintain a desirable weight, have a balanced diet and get plenty of sleep. For prehypertensive children, change in lifestyle and diet is recommended. However, if they exhibit other indications such as diabetes or renal disease, pharmacologic therapy is advised.

Benefits

• The aforementioned guidelines provide children and doctors alike with the benefit of detecting hypertension at an early stage. Monitoring the increase and decrease of blood pressure of a child gives parents the ability to change the child's lifestyle as early as possible and also cure hypertension while it is still at an early stage.