Blood Pressure Drops as Weight Comes Off
Excerpt By Will Boggs, Reuters Health

For people with high blood pressure that's not being treated with drugs, long-term weight loss brings a sustained reduction in blood pressure.

That good news comes from an article in the American Journal of Hypertension. The authors explain that weight loss has previously been shown to reduce the need for medication in hypertensive overweight patients, but nothing is known about the long-term effects of weight loss on blood pressure in unmedicated patients with hypertension.

This prompted Dr. Giuseppe Schillaci from the University of Perugia in Italy, and others, to look at the effects of weight changes on blood pressure in 181 overweight hypertensive patients. They had never been treated with antihypertensive medications, and remained untreated during the 4-year study.

In the group as a whole, average body weight did not change much during the study, the investigators report, but average blood pressures increased slightly. For individual patients, blood pressure varied directly with changes in body weight.

Also, changes in body weight also paralleled changes in the size of the left-side chambers of the heart. Heart enlargement often follows prolonged hypertension and can lead to heart failure.

In this study, heart size decreased in the people who lost weight loss and increased in those whose weight remained unchanged or increased.

"Even a modest degree of weight loss over the long term is highly beneficial in hypertensive overweight-to-obese patients," Dr. Schillaci told Reuters Health.

He said losing weight might be considered as the first and sometimes the only treatment for otherwise low-risk overweight subjects with high blood pressure.

SOURCE: American Journal of Hypertension, August 2003.

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