Study Links Deployment to Hypertension

DoD medical researchers have found that service members who suffered multiple combat exposures during a deployment, and especially those who had witnessed death as a result of war, were much more likely to report hypertension (chronic high blood pressure) compared to those who had not seen combat.

The report, titled “Newly Reported Hypertension After Military Combat Deployment in a Large Population-Based Study”and published in the September issue of Hypertension, a journal of the American Heart Association, has helped to shed more light on the correlation between high-stress situations and high blood pressure.

The study, a large population-based cohort conducted by researchers from the Millennium Cohort Study Team based out of the Department of Defense Center for Deployment Health Research at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, showed that 6.9 percent of service members surveyed were reporting hypertension within a three-year period. Out of that number, service members who deployed and reported multiple combat exposures were at significantly increased risk for reporting new cases of hypertension.

Although this does not close the book on hypertension, it poses a possibility that service members can suffer stress-induced hypertension from combat. In addition, this is just the first study to show an association between multiple combat exposures and hypertension, which will hopefully pave the way for more research to come.