It is no secret that gaining weight increases your risk of developing high blood pressure and that this is one of the risk factors associated with obesity. What we have not known until very recently however is just how high that risk is.
It has been well known for a long time that excess weight can lead to high blood pressure, and that losing weight can lower your blood pressure, but until now it has been difficult to quantify the degree of risk.
However, for more than twenty years now (since 1986) researchers have been monitoring the health a group of more than 22,000 doctors and, in one aspect of their research, have examined the relationship between weight and blood pressure in a sub-group of 13,563 male doctors whose blood pressure was normal at the start of the study. Each year throughout the study period a wide variety of lifestyle data was collected and health measurements taken, including each participant's body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure, and these measurements have now been analyzed to produce a twenty year picture.