Systolic Blood Pressure and Adiposity: Examination by Race and Gender in a Nationally Representative Sample of Young Adults

BACKGROUND Adiposity, or more specifically, underlying body fat distribution, has been associated with systolic blood pressure (SBP), and it has been suggested that these associations vary between whites and blacks, as well as by gender. METHODS Here, we use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a US study of over 15,000 participants (median age 29.0 years), to characterize the associations between measures of body fat distribution-waist circumference (WC) and WC adjusted for body mass index (BMI) (WC-bmi)-with SBP within white and black race and gender subgroups. RESULTS Our findings suggest that, at lower levels of WC-bmi, white women have significantly higher SBP as compared to black women, whereas black men have higher SBP than white men. Black women with WC-bmi>90 cm have higher SBP compared to white women with similar WC-bmi, whereas among black and white men the associations are essentially similar across the full range of WC-bmi. CONCLUSIONS The present results suggest that associations among anthropometric measures of adiposity and blood pressure are nonlinear, and importantly, vary for whites and blacks by gender. In black women, SBP increased more as WC increased from low- to mid-range levels, whereas it was only at higher WC levels that black men exhibited higher SBP than white men.