Objective: To investigate the association of hypertensive target organ damage with abnormal ankle brachial index (ABI) in high-risk hypertensive patients.
Methods: During December 2008 to May 2009, a cross-sectional study was conducted to investigated the prevalence of abnormal ABI (ABI < 0.90) in 2674 community-dwelling, hypertensive patients, who aged > 40 years, without coronary heart disease, stroke/transient ischemic attack or known arteriosclerosis, from 18 centers in China. Data were acquired through history, physical examination, laboratory and other diagnostic tests.
Results: There were 2615 subjects eligible for the full analysis set. The high-risk hypertensive patients with arterial wall thickening, arterial wall thickening and slightly elevated serum creatinine had a higher prevalence of abnormal ABI than their counterparts respectively (P < 0.05). Compared with the normal group, the abnormal ABI group had a higher serum creatinine level on average (P < 0.01). After adjustment for certain factors including investigation center, demographic factors, cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk and CVD risk factors using an unconditional logistic regression model, arterial wall thickening (OR 2.416, 95%CI 1.395 - 4.183, P = 0.0016) and slightly elevated serum creatinine (OR 3.377, 95%CI 1.267 - 8.997, P = 0.0149) were positively associated with abnormal ABI. However, arterial wall thickening (OR 0.988, 95%CI 0.576 - 1.695, P = 0.9664) and microalbuminuria (OR 1.389, 95%CI 0.685 - 2.817, P = 0.3621) were irrelevant to abnormal ABI.
Conclusions: So far as a high-risk hypertensive patient is concerned, there are significant statistical correlations between arterial wall thickening and/or slightly elevated serum creatinine and an abnormal ABI, but no significant statistical correlations between arterial wall thickening or microalbuminuria and an abnormal ABI is observed.