Background: A new method using blood pressure-to-height ratio for diagnosing elevated blood pressure/hypertension in children has been introduced recently. We aimed to compare blood pressure-to-height ratio (BPHR) and Body Mass Index (BMI) in predicting incidence of hypertension (HTN).
Methods: The sample consisted of 1133 boys and 1154 girls aged 7-15. We used the following equations for BPHR: systolic BPHR (SBPHR) = SBP (mm Hg)/height (cm) and diastolic BPHR (DBPHR) = DBP (mm Hg)/height (cm). In order to determine the accuracy of SBPHR, DBPHR and BMI as diagnostic tests for elevated blood pressure (elevated BP), we used the receiveroperating characteristic curve analyses.
Results: The area under the curve (AUC) values for BMI ranged from 0.625 to 0.723 with quite low sensitivity rates from 62% to 72.5% and specificities from 58.2% to 67.3% showing a modest ability to identify children with elevated BP and HTN. On the contrary, BPHR showed a great predictive ability to identify elevated BP and HTN with AUC values of 0.836 to 0.949 for SBP and from 0.777 to 0.904 for DBP. Furthermore, the sensitivity ranged from 78.5% to 95.7%, and the specificity from 73.9% to 87.6%.
Conclusion: the current study showed that BPHR is an accurate index for detecting elevated BP and HTN in children aged 7 to 15 years and can be used for early screening.
Keywords: children; diagnosis; elevated blood pressure; indicator.