#Couples Often Share High Blood Pressure, Study Finds

If you have high blood pressure, there’s a good chance your spouse has it too, a new study finds.

When researchers looked at data from middle-aged and older heterosexual couples in four countries around the world, they found a “high prevalence” of both the husband and wife experiencing hypertension, according to research published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

In the U.S., for example, more than a third of partners who were in their 50s or older, both had high blood pressure.

“We know that couples share the bathroom, they share their coffee, and now we’re learning they may actually share hypertension, or high blood pressure,” said NBC medical contributor Dr. Tara Narula in a TODAY segment on Dec. 6.

“You’re sharing a lot of the same lifestyle factors, and we know that what you do, how you live your life can really impact your blood pressure.”

The risk of high blood pressure rises as people get older, but the investigators were still surprised by the findings, said senior author Chihua Li, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, in a statement.

One possible explanation is that the health habits of spouses become similar over time, the paper noted.

“We wanted to find out if many married couples who often have the same interests, living environment, lifestyle habits and health outcomes may also share high blood pressure,” said study co-author Jithin Sam Varghese, Ph.D., an assistant research professor at the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, in a statement.

The answer appears to be yes.

The paper looked at health data from almost 4,000 U.S. couples, more than 1,000 British couples, more than 6,500 Chinese couples and more than 22,000 Indian couples. All spouses were middle-aged or older, living in the same household and reported to be married or partnered to one another.

The highest prevalence of both spouses having high blood pressure was in England where 47% both had hypertension.

In the U.S., 38% of couples shared the condition. The prevalence in China and India was 21% and 20%, respectively.

Almost half of American adults have high blood pressure, which is often called the “silent killer” because people may not have symptoms, Narula said.

“But as I explain to my patients … it’s silently damaging the blood vessels all over your body so you can end up with vision loss, heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, kidney failure and sexual dysfunction,” she warned. “So it really is important to pick it up.”

Doctors who currently treat couples as separate patients should consider treating them as a unit and checking for high blood pressure in the other partner if one is diagnosed with the condition, wrote Elvira D’souza, a member of the Journal of the American Heart Association’s patient editorial board, in an accompanying editorial to the study.

That could mean “couple-centered strategies,” including scheduling doctor’s appointments together and regularly monitoring blood pressure at home, she added.

Lifestyle changes such as exercising, lowering salt intake, eating a healthy diet, managing stress and alcohol use, and making sure that you don’t have any other underlying causes like sleep apnea can help lower blood pressure, Narula said.

“What this really does is really say is we can potentially open the door to a novel way of looking for high blood pressure,” she added.

“Go for walks together, cook together without salt. So there are ways that couples can do this together and we can really make a big public health impact.”