A proposal to simplify the definition of pediatric hypertension: bridging the gap between perception and action

The importance of routine hypertension screening in children and adolescents is now well recognized. However, it is often undiagnosed in clinical practice, partly due to the reliance on a complex blood pressure (BP) percentile-based table with hundreds of cutoffs by age, sex, and height.

Many studies have explored simplified tools for screening hypertension in children and adolescents, such as simplified formulas, simplified BP tables by age and sex group, by age group, or by height group, and the BP to height ratio. Nevertheless, validation studies have demonstrated that these simplified tools are prone to yielding many false-positive cases or remain inconvenient to use in primary pediatric care settings and large-scale screening surveys. To address this issue, we propose adopting static BP cutoffs of 120/80 mmHg for children aged 6-12 years and 130/80 mmHg for adolescents aged 13-17 years to simplify the definition of hypertension. Our proposed static BP cutoffs have shown comparable performance to the complex BP percentile-based table in predicting subclinical cardiovascular damage in both childhood and adulthood.

We recommend using static BP cutoffs (120/80 mmHg for children and 130/80 mmHg for adolescents) to facilitate the screening of pediatric hypertension in clinical practice, thereby bridging the gap between perception and action.