Blood pressure references for Polish children and adolescents.

The objective of this study was to develop age- and gender-specific reference ranges for blood pressure in a large national database on blood pressure levels throughout childhood and adolescence in young Poles. A prospective cross-sectional study was performed in 2002-2005 in the representative sampling sites, selected randomly from the entire Poland. Altogether, 6,447 school pupils, aged 7-18 years, were involved in the study of which 3,176 were boys and 3,271 were girls. Statistical analysis was performed using STATISTICA for Windows 7.1. The normal range of blood pressure, determined by age and the category of body height percentiles, revealed percentiles values which might serve as reference values to identify cases of high normal blood pressure (the mean blood pressure between 90th and 95th percentiles for age and gender) and hypertension (the mean blood pressure equals or exceeds the 95th percentiles on at least three occasions).