Hypertension is becoming one of the most common health conditions in children and adolescents due to increasing childhood obesity. We aimed to provide the auscultatory blood pressure (BP) normative reference values for Korean non-overweight children and adolescents. BP measurements in children and adolescents aged 10 to 18 years were performed in the Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) from 1998 to 2016. BP was measured using a mercury sphygmomanometer. Sex-, age- and height-specific systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) percentiles were calculated in the non-overweight children (n=10,442). We used the General Additive Model for Location Scale and Shape method to calculate BP percentiles. The 50th, 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles of SBP and DBP tables and graphs of non-overweight children and adolescents aged 10 to 18 years were presented by age and height percentiles. We found that the SBP and DBP at the 95th percentile were well correlated with height. The BP tables presented by height contained BP values from 124 cm to 190 cm for boys and from 120 cm to 178 cm for girls. Boys had higher SBP and DBP. We provided the sex-, age- and height-specific auscultatory BP values using the KNHANES big data. These may be useful in diagnosis and treatment of hypertension in Korean children and adolescents.

As the number of hypertension cases in the pediatric population is growing, we aimed to investigate the parent-offspring association of hypertension in Korea. We performed a cross-sectional analysis using the data of children and adolescents aged 10–18 years and their parents extracted from the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2008–2018). We analyzed the correlation of blood pressure (BP) between offspring and their parents and investigated the odds ratio (OR) of having hypertension in offspring based on parental hypertensive status. A total of 3996 children and adolescents (2224 boys and 1772 girls) aged 10–18 years and their parents (3197 fathers and 3197 mothers) were evaluated. Both boys and girls had positive associations with both parents for systolic and diastolic BP. When neither parent, only the father, only the mother, or both parents were hypertensive, 6.6%, 10.4%, 13.3%, and 25.3% of boys and 6%, 12%, 12.7%, and 22.1% of girls had hypertension, respectively. The risk of having hypertension among offspring was approximately two times higher when one parent was hypertensive and over four times higher when both parents were hypertensive compared to that among controls whose parents were not hypertensive (OR: 2.230, 1.655, and 5.021 in boys with hypertension and 2.321, 2.169, and 4.554 in girls with hypertension in the mother only, the father only, and both parents, respectively). We identified familial aggregation of hypertension in Korea. As there was an increased likelihood of having hypertension in children with parental hypertension, parental hypertension may be utilized as a screening tool for hypertension in children.

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Korean Circulation Journal 대한심장학회지 순환기 Lee JS, et al. Korean Circ J. 2019 Aug;50:e86. https://doi.org/10.4070/kcj.2019.0329