Learning from Two Decades of Blood Pressure Data: Demography-Specific Patterns Across 75 Million Patient Encounters
This work provides insights for personalized healthcare interventions by analyzing demographic variations in blood pressure, but it is incremental as it applies existing statistical methods to a new dataset.
The researchers analyzed 75 million blood pressure records from 2000 to 2022 to identify demography-specific patterns, finding that males have higher blood pressure than females, systolic blood pressure rises with age while diastolic peaks in the forties, and Blacks have marginally higher blood pressure with greater variability.
Hypertension is a global health concern with an increasing prevalence, underscoring the need for effective monitoring and analysis of blood pressure (BP) dynamics. We analyzed a substantial BP dataset comprising 75,636,128 records from 2,054,462 unique patients collected between 2000 and 2022 at Emory Healthcare in Georgia, USA, representing a demographically diverse population. We examined and compared population-wide statistics of bivariate changes in systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) across sex, age, and race/ethnicity. The analysis revealed that males have higher BP levels than females and exhibit a distinct BP profile with age. Notably, average SBP consistently rises with age, whereas average DBP peaks in the forties age group. Among the ethnic groups studied, Blacks have marginally higher BPs and a greater standard deviation. We also discovered a significant correlation between SBP and DBP at the population level, a phenomenon not previously researched. These results emphasize the importance of demography-specific BP analysis for clinical diagnosis and provide valuable insights for developing personalized, demography-specific healthcare interventions.