HYPERTENSION is something usually associated with older people but a Durban paediatric specialist says children as young as three years old should have their blood pressure checked at least once a year.

Professor Rajendra Bhimma says contrary to popular belief children can suffer from high blood pressure and in South Africa we are sitting on a “ticking time bomb” fueled by increasing rates of obesity amongst children.

Processed foods and the lack of exercise put many children at high risk of developing hypertension, he said.

“Compared to the 70s and 80s, exercise is limited, diet has completely changed, so the incidence of obesity has gone up.”

Bhimma says there are several health issues which can result in hypertension; like kidney, endocrine, thyroid and heart conditions, but it's also a bidirectional problem in that hypertension can also result in those medical conditions.

“So the thing with high blood pressure is that, previously in children, you could often find a cause for it. Most cases in children are secondary hypertension, usually in 85% of cases it's due to kidney problems. But what is interesting is that there was a very small group of them with high blood pressure, what is called primary hypertension. In other words, I couldn't find a cause for it.”

Bhimma says that when children develop hypertension doctors need to find the underlying cause of the problem. “Does the child have kidney disease, does he have an endocrine problem? Does he have a problem with his vessels, does he have a brain problem, and only after you've excluded all of those things, then you say, we can't find a cause, then we start thinking that maybe this is primary hypertension.”

“However, when people started investigating this and they started measuring blood pressure in children, what they found is that the incidence of primary hypertension was increasingly being diagnosed.”

From March 2016 to June 2017 Bhimma and several other researchers linked to the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital conducted a study on at least 500 Grade 12 pupils at public schools in the province. He said they excluded teenagers who had kidney disease, heart disease, or any form of brain disease, or endocrine problem.

Each child’s weight, height was measured. They also calculated their body mass index and did urine tests to check for protein, which is a mark of underlying kidney disease.

The study revealed that 15.9% of the pupils, all aged 17-18 were overweight, while 13.3 % were classified as obese.

“Our study showed that 14% of black children, around the age of 17 years, already have hypertension. It’s an important finding because the figures we’d previously had for primary hypertension was for children in Western countries,” said Bhimma.

He has called on parents to be more conscious of what their children eat to prevent poor health outcomes especially later in life.

“Take it 30 years down the line, those kids are going to most likely develop diabetes, they're going to get hypertension, chronic kidney disease, they're going to get kidney failure and end up on dialysis.”

“Studies show that as the incidence of obesity increases, the incidence of high blood pressure and diabetes also increases together with chronic kidney disease. We are sitting with a time bomb,” said Bhimma.

“Imagine what the dialysis units are going to look like it would literally be bursting at the seams. You can't cope with the number of patients” he said. Bhimma says currently the average age of their patients who get dialysis is 43 while they’re in the most productive stage of their lives, while in countries like Canada it's around 62 or 63.

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