Two-fold increase in hospitalizations for children with high blood pressure
The number of children hospitalized for high blood pressure has increased dramatically over the past decade – almost doubling from 12,661 in 1997 to 24,602 in 2006.
After calculating discharge records from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Kids’ Inpatient Database, researchers also discovered the rise in hypertension-related hospitalizations has led to a 50 percent increase in costs for inpatient care – reaching approximately $3.1 billion.
The study, published in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, stemmed from the equally dramatic increase in hypertension being seen in adults in the U.S.
“Looking through the research, there’s definitely a lot of published reports looking at the frequency of hypertension in outpatient settings, but there’s not a lot of inpatient data, especially in pediatrics,” Dr. Cheryl Tran, a fellow in the Department of Pediatric Nephrology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the study’s lead author, told FoxNews.com. “Numerous studies have examined the adult population, so given that trend in hypertension, we want to see how that translated over to the inpatient landscape.”