BLOOD PRESSURE VARIES WITH SOCIAL STATUS

Blood Pressure Varies With Social Status
France - A study by a team of Inserm Unit 707 and the Center for Preventive and Clinical Investigations of Paris shows that the more educated a person, but his district of residence, the lower blood pressure will be.

The study involved 7292 people aged 30 to 79 years, between March 2007 and February 2008 in Paris and its suburbs. She tried to target the social variations in health, including coronary diseases and their risk factors. He had already been shown that hypertension is more common in disadvantaged populations. But the study has pushed the analysis further.

Researchers are also interested in the education of the person and his parents, his profession, his state of unemployment, income, his financial stress, the tenure of housing, level of development country of birth, among others. In comparing all these factors, they noted a strong correlation between blood pressure, education level and the individual's home neighborhood.

Known causes of hypertension are the consumption of tobacco and alcohol use, overweight and obesity, lack of physical activity. Researchers have therefore included these cases in their analysis and showed that body mass index was higher by a factor widely implicated in hypertension. Obesity explain nearly half of the links between hypertension and education level of the neighborhood.