Age and sex-specific relationships between blood pressure variability and carotid intima-media thickness

This study evaluated theassociation between carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) and 24 hambulatory blood pressure variability (BPV) in 150 subjects. The subjects weredivided into different age groups and gender groups. We found that for the subjectsaged less than 45 years, 24 h and daytime diastolic BPV wereassociated with the increased IMT (r = 0.525, P = 0.018;r = 0.507, P = 0.022).For the middle aged people (46–55 years), daytime (r = 0.377, P = 0.014) and 24 hsystolic BPV (r = 0.366, P = 0.017)were more related to the increases in IMT than 24 h diastolic BPV(r = 0.320, P = 0.039).However, no association between carotid IMT and BPV was found in the elderly(>55 years). In addition, the relationships between carotid IMT and BPVwere more obvious in males than females. 24 h systolic BPV (P = 0.008) is theindependent factor to evaluate the increased carotid IMT for males, but not forfemales. The findings in our study indicated that age and sex had influences onprogression of carotid IMT. We conclude that the relationship between carotidIMT and ambulatory BPV can be modified by age and sex, thus, the regressionmodel using BPV to evaluate the arteriosclerotic progression should take ageand sex into account.