Hypertension risk in idiopathic hyperCKemia

Patients with idiopathic hyperCKemia are usually reassured and discharged. However, these subjects may have increased hypertension risk, based on data from our population study, which showed that the population tertile with the highest serum creatine kinase activities had the highest systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels. Therefore, we assessed whether subjects with idiopathic hyperCKemia have greater occurrence of hypertension than controls. We included 46 participants aged 18 to 67 years, diagnosed with idiopathic hyperCKemia at the departments of Neurology of the Universities of Amsterdam and Utrecht, The Netherlands. We found that 48% of the subjects with idiopathic hyperCKemia were hypertensive, as compared to 19% of the random population controls (n = 22,612, aged 20 to 65 years), an odds ratio of 3.9 (95 % CI, 2.2 to 6.9) before, and 2.0 (1.1 to 3.8) after adjustment for sex, age, and body mass index. In accord with our previous finding of an association between creatine kinase and blood pressure in the general population, the data reported here suggest that subjects with idiopathic hyperCKemia have greater hypertension risk than controls. This may be due to relatively high tissue creatine kinase activity, resulting in greater ATP buffer capacity to create and sustain high blood pressure levels.Larger, prospective studies are needed to further assess this association, but as active case finding is important in the diagnosis of hypertension, subjects with idiopathic hyperCKemia should be screened and monitored for the presence of hypertension.