Seminar series explores impacts of hypertension throughout different stages of life

The University of Alberta Pharmacology Students’ Association (PSA) hosted a series of virtual seminars aiming to advance cardiovascular health and care through discussing hypertension.

Hypertension Across the Lifespan was a two day long event where experts in the field of hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, informed students about the impacts that high blood pressure can have on different people and at different times. The PSA hosted this event with sponsorship from Hypertension Canada, a non-profit organization dedicated to hypertension prevention and control.

Speakers included Ross Tsuyuki, chair of the U of A’s department of pharmacology and also president of Hypertension Canada, who presented on the rising issue of hypertension and Dr. Sofia Ahmed, professor of medicine at the University of Calgary Cummings School of Medicine, who spoke about the considerations of sex and gender in hypertension.

Tsuyuki says hypertension is the world leading cause of death and disability, impacting 1.3 billion people globally. In Canada, 23 per cent of the population suffer from high blood pressure, the major being older individuals. One in five women and one in four men have this disease and these numbers are getting worse each year, as Tsuyuki believes by the end of the decade, one in every three Canadians will have hypertension.

What makes this illness so dangerous is the lack of symptoms.

“Probably the most important is that most people who have high blood pressure actually don’t know they have it because it doesn’t really cause any symptoms unless the blood pressure is super high like over 200,” Tsuyuki said. “It doesn’t really cause any symptoms until you have a heart attack or a stroke.”

Compared to other notable things which are bad for one’s health such as smoking, high cholesterol and obesity, Tsuyuki shows hypertension standouts as the number one cause of premature death and disability in the world. What makes it so dangerous is the impacts it has on other systems in the body. He emphasizes that not only can high blood pressure cause heart attacks and stroke, but it also can cause kidney failure and blindness.

Canada had one of the best hypertension control rates in the world at almost 70 per cent. However, Tsuyuki shares how in the past few years, this statistic has gone down dramatically with the most severe drop seen in older women where the level of control is about 48 per cent. With COVID-19, control rates have only gone down with a 50 per cent decrease in hypertension related doctor visits. 

Biological sex and hypertension

In addition to this decrease in control of high blood pressure in Canada in the past few years, studies show that the rates of hypertension are dependent on age and biological sex. Dr. Ahmed described how in people ages 64 or under, males have a much higher chance of being diagnosed with hypertension while in people older than 64, females have a higher occurrence of hypertension.

At the surface, it seems like what is causing this is potentially differences between the biological sexes; however, Dr. Ahmed says that it is more complex than this. She argues that one’s gender – whether the same or different from their biological sex – has a greater impact on blood pressure than sex.

Sex is determined one’s biological attributes and typically is categorized as male or female; gender is a socially constructed factor that includes how one identifies themselves, how society identifies them and how they interact with others depending on their gender.

“Those who had higher feminine characteristics… making less money, having more stress in the home, being responsible for housework, child care – those who had more of those responsibilities, had twice the risk of a recurring cardiac event,” Dr. Ahmed shared.

Rather than just looking at one’s biological sex as the contributor to their health or likelihood of being diagnosed with an illness, Dr. Ahmed believes their gender should be looked at. While the problem of hypertension may not be so easily solved, factors such as gender also need to be taken into consideration when researching.

“Every cell has a sex … and every person is gendered,” Dr. Ahmed said. “Both these things have been shown to impact a person’s blood pressure as well as their risk of hypertension.”