Evaluation of the Distribution and Factors Affecting Blood Pressure Using Medical Checkup Data in Japan

Abstract

In this paper, we first evaluated the distribution of blood pressure (BP) using a dataset containing 113,979 measurements in 48,022 individuals with the cooperation of one health insurance society in Japan from April, 2013 to March, 2016. The means of the systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) were 125.4 and 77.6 mmHg with standard deviations of 16.5 and 11.7 mmHg, respectively. Under the 140/90 criterion, 21.6% of the measurements showed hypertension. According to the World Health Organization/International Society of Hypertension criterion, 16.4%, 4.2% and 0.96% were classified as grades 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The factors affecting BP were evaluated by a regression analysis and were found to include age, gender, some eating habits, daily activities, smoking, drinking alcohol, sleeping and wages. Age was a very important factor, and the age cohorts from the previous study might be revised based on these findings. Among factors that individuals can control, the influence of drinking alcohol is very large. Comparing to an individual who does not drink, SBP and DBP of a heavy drinker are more than 5.0 mmHg higher on the average.