Beyond birth-weight: Improved ascertainment of early growth predicts blood pressure in Peruvian adolescents

Robie Sterling; William Checkley; Robert H Gilman; Lilia Cabrera; Charles R Sterling; Caryn Bern; J. Jaime Miranda

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.332v1

Beyond birth-weight: Improved ascertainment of early growth predicts blood pressure in Peruvian adolescents

Robie Sterling^1,2, William Checkley^2,3,4, Robert H Gilman^1,2,4, Lilia Cabrera², Charles R Sterling⁵, Caryn Bern⁶, J. Jaime Miranda ^1,7

1 CRONICAS Center of Excellence in Chronic Diseases, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru

2 Asociación Benéfica PRISMA, Lima, Peru

3 Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care, Johns Hopkins Universtiy, Baltimore, MD, USA

4 Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

5 Department of Veterinary Science and Microbiology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

6 Global Health Sciences and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

7 Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.332v1

Published: 2014-03-31
Accepted: 2014-03-31

Subject Areas: Cardiology, Epidemiology, Metabolic Sciences, Nutrition, Public Health
Keywords: Hypertension, developmental origins, obesity, lifecourse, Peru, cohort study

Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article: Sterling R, Checkley W, Gilman RH, Cabrera L, Sterling CR, Bern C, Miranda JJ. 2014. Beyond birth-weight: Improved ascertainment of early growth predicts blood pressure in Peruvian adolescents. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e332v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.332v1

Abstract

Background: Longitudinal investigations into the origins of adult essential hypertension have found elevated blood pressure in children to accurately track into adulthood, however the direct causes of essential hypertension in adolescence and adulthood remains unclear.

Methods: Cohort study, we revisited 152 Peruvian adolescents from a birth cohort evaluated with monthly anthropometric measurements between 1995 and 1998, and obtained anthropometric and blood pressure measurements 11 to 14 years later. We used multivariable regression models to study the effects of infantile and childhood growth trends on blood pressure and central obesity in early adolescence.

Results: In regression models adjusted for childhood growth, each 0.1 SD increase in weight for length from 0 to 5 months of age, and 1 SD increase from 6 to 30 months of age, predicted decreased adolescent systolic blood pressure by 1.3 mm Hg (95% CI -2.4 to -0.1) and 2.5 mm Hg (95% CI -4.9 to 0.0), and decreased waist circumference by 0.6 (95% CI -1.1 to 0.0) and 1.2 cm (95% CI -2.3 to -0.1) respectively. Growth in infancy and early childhood was not a significant predictor of adolescent waist-to-hip ratio.

Conclusions: Rapid compensatory growth in early life has been posited to increase the risk of long-term cardiovascular morbidities such that nutritional interventions may do more harm than good. However, we found increased weight growth during infancy and early childhood to predict decreases in adolescent systolic blood pressure and central adiposity.