In a large general-population study that was published online on March 19 in BMC Medicine, scientists including Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers found for the first time that the COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant increase in the number of people diagnosed with high blood pressure.

Gaetano Santulli, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues analyzed the medical records of more than 200,000 adults managed by primary-care physicians in Naples, Italy, and the surroundings area over the seven-year period 2017-2023—a span encompassing the 3 years before the pandemic, the 3 years of the pandemic, and one year afterward. They found that the incidence rate of new hypertension during the three years before the pandemic (2017-2019) was 2.11 per 100 person-years; that rate more than doubled, to 5.20, during the pandemic (2020-2022) and rose still further, to 6.76, in 2023, when the COVID-19 global health emergency was declared over by the World Health Organization. By the end of the seven-year observation period, new-onset hypertension affected about 15% of the study cohort. The authors recommend that hypertension screening should not be limited to people aware of having developed COVID-19 but should extend to the entire population.

Dr. Santulli is associate professor of medicine and of molecular pharmacology at Einstein.