Association of blood pressure variability with target organ damage in older patients with essential hypertension

Although multiple measures of blood pressure variability (BPV) have been proposed, whether they are better than mean blood pressure in predicting target organs is unclear. We aimed to determine the relationship between short term BPV and target organ injury.

This study was a retrospective study, and 635 inpatients in the Department of Cardiology from 2015 to 2020 were selected. We divided participants into four groups on the basis of the quartiles of BPV. One-way analysis of variance was used to compare the differences between the groups, and linear regression was used to analyze the relationship between BPV and target organ damage.

The average age of 635 patients was 74.36 ± 6.50 years old. Among them, 354 of 627 patients had diminished renal function (56.5%), 221of 604 patients had associated left ventricular hypertrophy (36.6%), and 227 of 231 patients had carotid plaque formation (98.3%). The baseline data indicated significant differences in fasting glucose, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein, creatinine, glomerular filtration rate, sex, calcium channel blocker use, and the rate of diminished renal function. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that BPV was negatively correlated with renal injury (creatinine: r = 0.306, p < 0.01; estimated glomerular filtration rate: r = 0.058, p < 0.01), and BPV is positively correlated with cardiac injury (r = 0.083, p < 0.01). Elevated BPV was not found to be associated with vascular injury.

Renal function decreases with increasing BPV and left ventricular mass increases with increasing BPV.