According to recent research, persons in the United States, particularly women, experienced an increase in blood pressure throughout the COVID pandemic The research, which was reported in the journal Circulation on Monday, featured information on 464,585 workers and their partners from a variety of firms who engaged in Quest Diagnostics’ company wellness initiatives every year.
Employees and their spouses in all 50 states and the District of Columbia had the blood pressure monitored for 3 years from 2018 to 2020 as phase of the initiatives. The blood pressure results were analyzed by Dr. Luke Laffin, co-director of Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Blood Pressure Disorders, and his collaborators from Cleveland Clinic and Quest Diagnostics.
Women more affected
The scientists determined that blood pressure observations all through the pandemic in April to December 2020 were considerably greater than in 2019, with rises varying 1.1 to 2.5 mmHg for systolic and 0.14 to 0.53 mmHg for diastolic pressure.
The higher or systolic measurement and the lower or diastolic measurement are both used to calculate blood pressure in millimeters of mercury (mmHg).
Although both men and women had rises in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, the scientists discovered that women experienced bigger rises.
“We did see more pronounced increases in blood pressure in women. Now, we don’t know the exact reason for that. However, we do know and there’s data to suggest that the pandemic has tended to place more of an outsized burden on women, particularly women that work, and this is an employer-sponsored wellness program,” explained Laffin.
Even if poor nutrition decisions throughout the pandemic might have had a part, among many other variables, the researchers concluded that weight increase was not the obvious cause of rising blood pressure readings during the epidemic.
We know that eating too much salt or drinking excessively raises blood pressure, which has been widely documented throughout the epidemic. Then there’s the fact that factors like sleep, medication, and other factors all have a part in blood pressure.
