The Children’s of Alabama Hypertension Clinic aims to help children in the short-term and long-term. (Stock photo)
Successfully stemming rising rates of cardiovascular disease in adults needs to start in childhood. But with mounting numbers of children and adolescents developing high blood pressure—a trend driven largely by skyrocketing obesity rates—this objective is getting harder to achieve. Enter the Pediatric Hypertension Program at Children’s of Alabama, which, with its steady growth, seeks to break the cycle.
The Hypertension Clinic, which operates three half-days each week, now sees about 45 patients weekly, a 10-fold increase from 14 years ago, says Daniel Feig, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Pediatric Nephrology at Children’s, who was recruited in 2011 to oversee the clinic’s development and expansion.
High blood pressure—defined in adults and children 13 years and older as a reading of 130/80 mm Hg or higher—is relatively unusual in healthy young patients, affecting 2-3% of typical children and adolescents. (For younger children, the definition of hypertension is a statistical one, based on greater than 95th percentile for age, sex and height.) But children with obesity—who account for nearly 20% of all Americans under 18—have a 20-30% rate of hypertension, says Feig, also the Margaret Porter Professor of Pediatrics at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
“There’s a fairly large number of kids with high blood pressure, and one of the major concerns is how we can impact the long-term epidemic that results in cardiovascular disease in adults,” he said. “Controlling hypertension in adults hasn’t gone very well—only about half of those diagnosed have even remotely effective control. This impacts their cardiovascular disease and stroke risk.”
“The only way we can get this under control is by prevention,” Feig added. “If we can make an impact in children and adolescents, we can push back cardiovascular disease in adults.”
Drawing patients from across Alabama as well as some from eastern Mississippi and western Georgia, the Children’s Hypertension Program provides ongoing care for about 2,200 children. But this “catchment area” is likely home to about 70,000 young people with high blood pressure who are undiagnosed. Part of the problem is that many pediatricians aren’t comfortable diagnosing or treating the condition, Feig explains.
When patients come to Children’s, they’re often set up with ambulatory blood pressure monitoring equipment they wear for 24 to 48 hours to measure blood pressure a few times each hour while doing normal activities. The technology enables Children’s clinicians to tease out who actually has hypertension and not blood pressure spikes resulting from factors such as exertion, nervousness or pain.
Once diagnosed, Feig and pediatric nurse practitioner Jessica Edmondson collaborate with dietitians, pharmacists, social workers and others at Children’s to ensure patients benefit from a multidisciplinary approach to treatment. Ultimately, they’re trying to prevent both short- and long-term health implications resulting from hypertension, including heart thickening, retinal damage and even impairments in cognitive function.
It’s a daunting task, Feig acknowledges. “Anything we can do to reduce the numbers right now has a domino effect that reduces long-term target organ damage and long-term cardiovascular risk,” he said. “We’re not at a point where we can reverse the trajectory in 70,000 undiagnosed kids in Alabama, but we can positively impact a good number of kids, improve their health and quality of life, and gain the opportunity to gradually access more and more of them.”
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