Published Online
on September 2, 2008

A more recent version of this article appeared on October 1, 2008

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Submitted on April 1, 2008
Revised on April 20, 2008

Immediate Postnatal Growth Is Associated With Blood Pressure in Young Adulthood. The Barry Caerphilly Growth Study

Yoav Ben-Shlomo^*; Anne McCarthy; Rachael Hughes; Kate Tilling; David Davies; and George Davey Smith

From the Department of Social Medicine (Y.B-S., A.M., R.H., K.T., G.D.S.), University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom; and the Department of Child Health (D.D.), University College of Wales, Cardiff, United Kingdom.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: y.ben-shlomo{at}bristol.ac.uk.

Abstract—There is a consistent inverse association between birth weight and systolic blood pressure; however, few studies have been able to examine the immediate postnatal period. We have examined whether accelerated postnatal growth predicts adult systolic and diastolic blood pressure. We followed up participants from the Barry Caerphilly Growth Study. Blood pressure data were obtained on 679 of the original 951 subjects (73%) aged 25 years. Both multivariable linear regression and spline models were used to examine the association among weight, length, and growth velocities with systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure. Both statistical approaches showed that birth weight was inversely associated with systolic blood pressure. Only the spline models found that immediate (0 to 5 months) weight gain ( coefficient: 1.29 mm Hg; 95% CI: 0.36 to 2.23; P=0.007) and weight gain between 1 year and 9 months to 5 years ( coefficient: 1.44 mm Hg; 95% CI: 0.31 to 2.57; P=0.01) were independently associated with systolic blood pressure, whereas only immediate weight gain ( coefficient: 0.74 mm Hg; 95% CI: 0.08 to 1.41; P=0.03) was associated with diastolic blood pressure. This is the first study to demonstrate that only immediate postnatal growth predicts diastolic blood pressure in term births, whereas it adds further evidence that both birth weight and postnatal growth are associated with systolic blood pressure in support of both the fetal origins and growth acceleration hypotheses.

Key words: blood pressure • birth weight • cohort study • growth and development • public health

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