Washington: Body mass index and blood pressure are positively associated, according to a new study.

In the ongoing study of 1.7 million Chinese men and women being conducted by researchers at the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) in China, individuals who were not taking an antihypertensive medication, were observed with an increase of 0.8 to 1.7 mm Hg (kg/m2) in blood pressure per additional unit of body mass index (BMI).

First author and doctoral candidate at Yale, George Linderman said, "The enormous size of the dataset -- the result of an unprecedented effort in China -- allows us to characterize this relationship between BMI and blood pressure across tens of thousands of subgroups, which simply would not be possible in a smaller study."

Researchers recorded the participants' blood pressure from September 2014 through June 2017 as part of the larger China Patient-Centered Evaluative Assessment of Cardiac Events (PEACE) Million Persons Project, which captures at least 22,000 subgroups of people based on age (35-80), sex, race/ethnicity, geography, occupation, and other pertinent characteristics -- such as whether or not they are on antihypertensive medication.

Senior author on the study Harlan Krumholz said, "If trends in overweight and obesity continue in China, the implication of our study is that hypertension, already a major risk factor, is likely to become even more important. This paper is ringing the bell that the time is now to focus on these risk factors."

According to the researchers, one way for the Chinese healthcare system to address these risk factors would be the management of high blood pressure with antihypertensive drugs.

The full findings are present in the journal- JAMA Network Open.