Warm weather, walkable neighborhoods tied to lower blood pressure in kids

Kids who grow up in warmer climates and in walkable neighborhoods may have lower blood pressure than those who live where it’s cooler and people drive everywhere, a new European study suggests. Researchers examined data on 1,277 mother-child pairs from the U.K., France, Spain, Lithuania, Norway, and Greece to see how exposures to outdoor factors like air pollution and weather, chemicals like pesticides and metals, and lifestyle factors like diet and exercise impacted blood pressure in kids age 6 to 11 years old. The study team focused on a total of 89 exposures in the womb and 128 exposures during early childhood. “Our results show that, starting in the fetal stage, where we live, the food we eat, the air we breathe and the chemical compounds that reach our bodies can affect blood pressure before adolescence,” said Charline Warembourg, lead author of the study and a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal). “This is important because evidence shows that children with high blood pressure are more likely to be hypertensive as adults,” Warembourg said by email. Exposure to negative lifestyle factors in pregnancy, such as obesity, physical inactivity, poor diet, and alcohol and tobacco consumption have long been established as heart disease risk factors for mothers, researchers note in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. In the current study, researchers analyzed data from blood and urine tests of young children to see what environmental, chemical and lifestyle factors might be associated with higher or lower blood pressure. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-childhood-hypertension/warm-weather-walkable-neighborhoods-tied-to-lower-blood-pressure-in-kids-idUSKCN1VP281