More time spent on mobile phone per week linked to higher risk of high blood pressure

May 17th of each year is World Hypertension Day, an important global event initiated by the World Hypertension League (WHL). The theme of this year's World Hypertension Day is "Accurate Measurement, Effective Control, Healthy and Long Life", which aims to raise people's awareness of hypertension, draw people's attention to the prevention and treatment of hypertension, and improve the accuracy of blood pressure measurement, so as to effectively treat hypertension and achieve health and longevity.

In today's society, mobile phones have become an indispensable part of people's lives. Whether frequent use of mobile phones has an impact on health has always been the focus of people's attention.

Recently, the National Clinical Research Center for Kidney Diseases, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, published a study titled "Mobile phone calls, genetic susceptibility, and new-onset hypertension: results from 212 046 UK Biobank participants" in European Heart Journal Digital Health . This study shows that the frequency of mobile phone calls may affect the risk of new-onset hypertension . The longer the mobile phone talk time per week, the higher the risk of hypertension. Professor Qin Xianhui of the National Clinical Research Center for Kidney Diseases, Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University is the corresponding author of the article, and Dr. Ye Ziliang and Dr. Zhang Yanjun are the co-first authors.

Hypertension is known as the "silent killer" because it rarely causes obvious symptoms. It causes more than half of all strokes and heart attacks and increases the risk of chronic diseases such as kidney disease and dementia. The prevalence of hypertension is still rising rapidly in low- and middle-income countries.

This study is a prospective cohort study based on the UK Biobank, which included 212,046 participants without hypertension at baseline. The primary endpoint of the study was new-onset hypertension. The average age of the study population was 53.7 years, of which 37.7% were male. Among them, the proportion of mobile phone users was 87.6%.

The study showed that people who talked on the phone for at least 30 minutes a week were 12% more likely to be diagnosed with high blood pressure than those who spent less time on the phone. People who talked on the phone for 4-6 hours a week had a 16% increased risk of being diagnosed with high blood pressure, and those who talked on the phone for more than 6 hours a week had a 25% increased risk.

Figure 1 Main results of the study

At the same time, this study divided the participants into three groups according to their genetic risk of hypertension: low, medium and high. The results showed that participants with a higher genetic risk of hypertension had a higher risk of developing hypertension if they frequently used mobile phones.

Figure 2 Participants with high mobile phone call frequency and high genetic risk have the highest risk of hypertension

The researchers believe that radiation during phone calls, as well as the reduced sleep quality and increased stress caused by long phone calls, may be associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure.

The results of this study encourage people to maintain a moderate frequency of mobile phone calls to reduce the risk of hypertension .

The Altmetric Attention score is a measure of the international attention paid to research papers after they are published. As of May 16, this study has an Altmetric Attention score of 1306, making it our first paper to exceed 1000 (and our second to exceed 900) . This is the 8,807th out of 23,775,451 research outputs tracked by Altmetric from all sources.

It has been reported and recommended by 152 international news outlets, 7 blogs, 226 tweeters and 1 Facebook page.

Altmetric has tracked 23,775,451 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.

References:

Ziliang Ye, Yanjun Zhang, Yuanyuan Zhang, Sisi Yang, Mengyi Liu, Qimeng Wu, Chun Zhou, Panpan He, Xiaoqin Gan, Xianhui Qin, Mobile phone calls, genetic susceptibility, and new-onset hypertension: results from 212 046 UK Biobank participants, European Heart Journal - Digital Health , 2023;, ztad024.

Editor | Ye Ziliang, Zhang Yanjun, Huang Yu

Audit | Qin Xianhui

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