Does blood pressure usually rise with age? . . . Or with stress?

To determine whether blood pressure increases commonly accompany the aging process or reports of psychological distress during adulthood, successive blood pressure readings from eight to 14 annual health examinations of 172 employed men were studied. Longitudinal analysis showed that blood pressures tended to decline on the average over the first four examinations, possibly a familiarization effect. Even during the later period (extending four to ten years), 45 percent had no systematic increase in systolic pressure and 60 percent no systematic increase in diastolic pressure (i.e., averaging 0.5 mm/Hg per year or greater). Older and heavier men had higher mean pressures, as did those men with higher anxiety and hostility scores. The slope of blood pressure increase in the later part of the period of observation was greater for individuals who reported lower amounts of stress. There is need to discover additional correlates of systematic blood pressure increase over time. It appears, however, that about half of adult men do not experience steady blood pressure increases with aging. While anxiety and hostility correlate with concurrent blood pressure levels, neither these variables nor other estimates of stress were positively correlated with increasing blood pressure levels over these years.