[Blood pressure in children and adolescents aged 4 to 18. Correlation of blood pressure values with age, sex, body height, body weight and skinfold thickness (Essen Blood Pressure Study)].

1,165 randomly selected school children/adolescents and 306 preschool children living in Essen, West Germany, were examined for their systolic and diastolic (phase IV and V) blood pressure (BP), height, weight, and skinfold thickness. These are 97% of the original random sample school children/adolescents and 70.7% of the preschool children (under seven years old). Ages ranged from 4 to 18 years with 51% male and 49% female. Examination of the school children was performed in 20 different schools representative for the various types of school found in this city. BP was found to increase with age. In boys, the increase was significantly steeper during adolescence than in the preadolescence period (p less than 0.001). Adolescent boys had higher BP values than adolescent girls. In children younger than 10 years BP was similar to that reported in the Bogalusa study. The evaluation of partial correlation coefficients (rpart) identified body weight as the most important determinant of systolic BP (rpart = 0.25) and diastolic BP (rpart = 0.17) (p less than 0.0001).