| Family
history of hypertension may reflect dysfunctional behavioral responses
to stress as well as shared physiology Individual risk for hypertension associated with a parental history of hypertension may be influenced by observations of dysfunctional response to stress by parents, according to an article in the May issue of Health Psychology. Researchers found that children of hypertensive parents are more likely to react more negatively, both behaviorally and physiologically, to stressful situations. The reason may in part be because certain behaviors, like conflict avoidance and inadequate expression of feelings, were part of family environments and were passed from generation to generation in hypertensive families, says lead author Nicole L. Frazer, Ph.D. Children of hypertensive parents not only exhibited exaggerated physiological reactivity to stressors but also exhibited learned maladaptive behavioral responses to stressors, said Frazer. The authors examined the behavioral responses, heart rate, and blood pressure of 64 healthy college students --- some of whom had hypertensive parents and others of whom had normotensive parents--- during stressful mental activities to explain observed differences in cardiovascular reactivity to stress. The participants included 16 men and 16 women who had parents with hypertension and 16 men and 16 women who had parents with normal blood pressure. All of the participants participated in a mental arithmetic task, a mirror tracing task, and two interpersonal role-plays to mimic stressful mental activities. Both the males and the females in the parental hypertension group had higher resting heart rates than the females and males in the control group. Furthermore, those in the parental hypertension group had greater increases in their systolic blood pressure during the mental tasks; they also reacted with more negative verbal and nonverbal behaviors during both the interpersonal and non-interpersonal laboratory-induced stress tasks. Interestingly, even though the parental hypertension participants demonstrated exaggerated cardiovascular responses and a greater frequency of negative verbal and nonverbal behaviors than the control subjects, the differences were independent. The hypertension participants with more extreme blood pressure responses and resting heart rates were not always the same as the parental hypertension subjects who responded more with negative verbal and nonverbal behaviors, said the authors. "It is possible that to determine the risk for cardiovascular disease among offspring of hypertensive parents may require assessing behavioral responses to stress in addition to assessing cardiovascular responses to stressors." The connection between family arguments and cardiovascular response has been shown in research on couples from hypertensive families. "This suggests," said Frazer, "that for offspring of hypertensive parents, certain behavioral styles of interacting in relationships might predispose them to essential hypertension or cardiovascular disease." If the relation between these
behavioral styles of interacting are shown to be related to risk
for cardiovascular disease, early interventions involving conflict
management, relaxation, assertiveness and social skills training
may be considered for hypertensive families. In this case, learning
these skills may break a pattern and help those individuals from
hypertensive families change both their physiological and behavioral
responses to environmental stressors and minimize their risk for
cardiovascular disease, said Frazer. |