Effects of At-Risk Drinking on Ambulatory Blood Pressure in Young Adults

Abstract

Introduction: At-risk drinking is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) even in young adults. However, this association is mainly based on offce blood pressure (BP) measurement. Ambulatory BP monitoring captures diurnal variation in BP and is a more sensitive CVD predictor than offce BP. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of at-risk drinking on ambulatory BP in young healthy adults with normal offce BP. Method: A total of 20 healthy men and women (21-35 years), non-smokers, were included in this cross-sectional study. All participants had an offce BP lower than 130/80 mmHg. Using the US Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (USAUDIT), at-risk drinkers were defined as those having a total USAUDIT score higher than 7 for men (6 for women). All participants underwent 24-hour ambulatory BP monitoring (Oscar 2™, SunTech Medical®). To investigate the vascular mechanisms underlying the effects of at-risk drinking on ambulatory blood pressure, aortic arterial stiffness and wave reflection were measured as pulse wave velocity (PWV) and augmentation index (AIx) by using SphygmoCor XCEL system (AtCor Medical). Results: No differences were found in age and BMI between at-risk drinkers (n=10) vs. low-risk drinkers (n=10; mean ± SD for age: 26.7 ± 3.7 vs. 26.6 ± 4.3 years, P>0.99 and BMI: 24.5 ± 2.4 vs. 23.8 ± 2.9 kg/m2, P=0.6). At-risk drinkers had a higher total USAUDIT score (10.6 ± 2.7 vs. 1.4 ± 1.2, p<0.001). While there was no difference between at-risk drinkers and low-risk drinkers in 24-hour, daytime, and nighttime systolic and diastolic BP (P≥0.5), at-risk drinkers had a higher blood pressure morning surge compared to low-risk drinkers (systolic: 34 ± 10 vs. 22 ± 6 mmHg, P=0.014 and diastolic: 29 ± 9 vs. 15 ± 4 mmHg, P=0.002). No significant difference was found in PWV (5.7 ± 0.6 Vs. 5.5 ± 0.7 m/sec, P=0.4) and AIx (8 ± 8 Vs. 15 ± 11, P=0.1). Conclusion: Our results indicate that despite similar offce BP, young adult at-risk drinkers had higher BP morning surge, an independent risk factor for cardiovascular events, than low-risk drinkers. These findings provide implications in using USAUDIT and out-of-offce BP measurements for cardiovascular disease risk assessment. This work was supported by NIAAA AA028537 to CLH. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.