A new research of the Northwestern Medicine has claimed that middle aged men and women who have high blood pressure are 30 per cent more likely to have heart attack or stroke than people having low blood pressure. The group of researchers who conducted the aforementioned study has tried to draw our attention to the significance of maintaining low blood pressure in middle age to thwart the risk of stroke or heart attack in later age.

All the preceding studies about the impact of blood pressure on developing cardiovascular diseases have showed that blood pressure have significant effect on cardiovascular diseases but the aforementioned study is the first that showed more precise result and claimed that having high blood pressure levels in between the age of 41 and 55 leads to cardiovascular diseases.

The first author of the study Norrina Allen who is also an assistant professor in the preventive medicine department at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, while revealing the study findings has mentioned that we can prevent the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases until we develop hypertension or in other words, the longer we can hold back the hypertension the lesser the chances of developing cardiovascular diseases are. That is why men and women who become successful to hold on to a low blood pressure level until the age of 55 are less likely to develop cardiovascular diseases in later time.

For the sake of the study researchers analyzed the data of 61,585 people who had participated in the Cardiovascular Lifetime Risk Pooling Project. The researchers observed the participants from the age of 41 to their first occurrence of stroke or heart attack or till the age of 95. They measured the participants blood pressure levels ones in the age of 41 and then in the age of 55.

They found that male participants who started with high blood pressure or developed high blood pressure in the middle age had 70 per cent chances of stroke or heart attack while those male participants who had low blood pressure in the middle age or those who experienced a reduction in blood pressure level had only 41 per cent chances of stroke or heart attack.

In case of women participants who had high blood pressure in the middle age had 50 per cent risk of developing cardiovascular diseases while women with low blood pressure showed only 22 per cent risk.

The study findings were has been appeared in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.