MONDAY, Jan. 22, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Higher prenatal humidity and temperature could modulate blood pressure (BP) changes across childhood, according to a study published online in the February issue of JACC: Advances.

Ana Gonçalves Soares, Ph.D., from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and colleagues collected repeated measures of systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) in up to 7,454 participants from a U.K. birth cohort to assess the associations of 43 prenatal urban environmental exposures with BP trajectories. The findings were replicated in four independent European cohorts with up to 9,261 participants.

The researchers found associations for higher humidity with a faster increase in SBP in childhood (mean yearly change in SBP for an interquartile range increase in humidity: 0.29 mm Hg/year) and for higher temperature with a slower increase (mean yearly change in SBP per interquartile range increase in temperature: –0.17 mm Hg/year) in discovery analyses. A faster increase in DBP in childhood and slower increase in adolescence were seen in association with higher levels of humidity and air pollution. Little evidence was seen for an association of other exposures with change in SBP or DBP. In other cohorts, results for humidity and temperature, but not air pollution, were replicated.

“Our study contributes to the growing body of evidence on the longitudinal associations of prenatal environmental exposures with blood pressure later in life,” the authors write.

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