close window
Housecall Archives
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
close window
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risk factors
By Mayo Clinic staffRisk factors for prehypertension include:
- Being overweight or obese. A primary risk factor is being overweight. The greater your body mass, the more blood you need to supply oxygen and nutrients to your tissues. As the volume of blood circulated through your blood vessels increases, so does the force on your artery walls.
- Age. Younger adults are more likely to have prehypertension than are older adults — probably because most older adults have progressed to high blood pressure. In fact, adults who are healthy at age 55 have a 90 percent chance of developing high blood pressure at some point in their lives, according to the American Heart Association.
- Sex. Prehypertension is more common in men than in women.
- Family history of high blood pressure.
- Sedentary lifestyle.
- Diet high in sodium or low in potassium.
- Tobacco use.
- Excessive alcohol use.
Certain chronic conditions — including high cholesterol, diabetes and sleep apnea — may increase the risk of prehypertension as well.
References
- Svetkey LP. Management of prehypertension. Hypertension. 2005;45:1056.
- What are high blood pressure and prehypertension? National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/hbp/hbp/whathbp.htm. Accessed April 8, 2010.
- Liszka HA, et al. Prehypertension and cardiovascular morbidity. Annals of Family Medicine. 2005;3:294.
- Green L. Prehypertension, patient outcomes, and the knowledge base of family medicine. Annals of Family Medicine. 2005;3:292.
- Chobanian AV, et al. Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure. Hypertension. 2003;42:1206.
- Schunkert H. Pharmacotherapy for prehypertension — Mission accomplished? New England Journal of Medicine. 2006;354:1742.
- Julius S, et al. Feasibility of treating prehypertension with an angiotensin-receptor blocker. New England Journal of Medicine. 2006;354:1685.
- Karanja N, et al. Acceptability of sodium-reduced research diets, including the dietary approaches to stop hypertension diet, among adults with prehypertension and stage 1 hypertension. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2007;107:1530.
- Maruthur NM, et al. Lifestyle interventions reduce coronary heart disease risk: Results from the PREMIER trial. Circulation. 2009;119:2026.
- Pimenta E, et al. Prehypertension: Epidemiology, consequences and treatment. Nature Review Nephrology. 2010;6:21.
- Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/DGAs2010-PolicyDocument.htm. Accessed Feb. 18, 2011.
Find Mayo Clinic on