A new study shows that children and adolescents with hypertension (high blood pressure) have a 4.5 times greater risk of developing kidney disease when they become young adults compared to their peers without hypertension. The results, published in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, also show those with hypertension have an elevated risk of kidney failure.
Dr. Janis Dionne is a researcher with the BC Children's Hospital Research Institute, who helped analyze the study results. She says although studies of adults show there is a clear link between hypertension and kidney disease – where the two conditions can exacerbate one another – it’s harder to find long-term data exploring the possibility that hypertension in childhood is associated with kidney disease in adulthood.
“It's very hard to prove, to follow children and adolescents long enough to make those associations, and this study group had a very large dataset that actually allowed us to look at that,” Dionne says.
In their study, the researchers analyzed anonymized health records from Ontario of more than 26,300 children and adolescents with hypertension between 1996 and 2023, comparing their health outcomes to those of more than 126,800 children without the condition, but who were of similar age, sex, etc. The health records spanned an average of 14 years of follow-up time.
The results show that children with hypertension have a 4.5 times greater risk of developing kidney disease, and a 7 times greater risk of kidney failure, in adulthood compared to their peers without hypertension.
What is particularly striking about this study, Dionne notes, is that the people with pediatric hypertension were still relatively young adults, in their late 20s and 30s by the end of the study period, and yet they were already experiencing kidney complications at very high rates. The results also showed that the younger a person was when they first developed hypertension, the more likely they were to have kidney damage as adults.
Dionne cautions that this study doesn’t prove that hypertension in childhood directly causes kidney diseases in adulthood - more thorough studies are needed to find definitive proof. But it does suggest that a link is possible.
She adds, “The study results certainly reinforce our idea that it's important to screen for hypertension in kids,” noting that managing it could potentially reduce children’s risk of kidney complications later in life.
In future work, Dionne plans to explore the risk factors for pediatric hypertension in even younger age groups as well as develop recommendations (a clinical pathway) to guide pediatricians in the province on proper screening, diagnosing and managing of pediatric hypertension.
