Associations of Body Composition with Blood Pressure and Hypertension

Abstract

Objective The present study investigated the associations of body composition, including skeletal muscle and fat mass, with blood pressure (BP) and hypertension. Methods Data from 3,130 participants aged 18 to 80 years were analyzed. Body composition and total skeletal muscle (TSM) were measured or calculated based on dual‐energy x‐ray absorptiometry. Multivariate linear and logistic regression models were used to analyze the associations of TSM, body fat percentage, android to gynoid fat ratio, and leg and arm lean body mass (LBM) with BP and hypertension. The Wald test was used to estimate the differences in the coefficients. Results TSM indices, body fat percentage, and android to gynoid fat ratio were significantly associated with higher odds ratio for prehypertension and hypertension, except for TSM/weight, after controlling for potential confounders. The standardized beta coefficients of arm LBM indices for systolic and diastolic BP were higher than relevant indices of leg LBM. Conclusions Different indices of TSM, especially in arm LBM, were all positively associated with elevated BP, prehypertension, and hypertension in Chinese adults, after considering potential confounding factors, including body fat and fat distribution. Future longitudinal studies are warranted to confirm our findings.

Health improvement framework for planning actionable treatment process using surrogate Bayesian model

“…The paths mainly consisted of a sequence of changes in leg score, blood glucose, and g-GTP among the intervention variables. The direction of change in these variables was consistent with conventional clinical knowledge for improving blood pressure [29][30][31][32][33][34][35] . For example, high-blood glucose levels have been reported to be a risk factor of hypertension.…”

“…Important features comprised items related to hypertension, such as age, body composition (leg score, body mass index (BMI), and waist), blood glucose, and gamma glutamyl transferase (g-GTP) [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] . Therefore, the selected explanatory variables were considered to be reasonable for SBP predictive models from the clinical perspective.…”

Android Fat Deposition and Its Association With Cardiovascular Risk Factors in Overweight Young Males

“…Overweight is a well-recognized risk factor for pre-hypertension and hypertension and studies have suggested that the risk of developing hypertension may be linked to body fatness and body fat distribution (Wiklund et al, 2008; Ye et al, 2018). Similarly, excess adiposity is characterized by elevated sympathetic nervous system activity, even in young healthy individuals, which is likely to impact on their CV risk including hypertension development (Lambert et al, 2010).…”

A prospective cohort study on the association of lean body mass estimated by mid‐upper arm muscle circumference with hypertension risk in Chinese residents

“… 4 , 5 , 6 The unfavorable relationship between LBM and hypertension has been found in cross‐sectional studies, while opposite findings were also reported. 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 Such inconsistency was probably resulted from the variances of populations, as well as the utilities of different measurements of LBM. On the other hand, the deficiency of longitudinal design in published studies made it failed to verify the causality between increased LBM and hypertension.…”