2007年VOA标准英语-Most Children with High Blood Pressure Not Diag

By Carol Pearson
Washington
22 August 2007
 

High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a disease usually associated with adults, but children can get it too and can have serious health problems because of it. A new study is now calling for pediatricians to screen children more carefully for this disease. VOA's Carol Pearson explains.

It is sometimes difficult to determine if a child has high blood pressure because so many variables are involved. 

Dr. David Kaelber

Dr. David Kaelber is a pediatrician who studied some 15,000 children's medical records spanning a seven-year period. "The way that normal and abnormal blood pressures are defined for children are --  it's based on their gender¹, it's based on their height percentile and it's also based on their age.  So the challenge here is that there's literally² hundreds of normal and abnormal blood pressure values for children."

Plus, high blood pressure is something doctors may not be looking for, since hypertension is not normally associated with children.

In his study, Dr. Kaelber found that only a quarter of the children with high blood pressure were diagnosed. "To try to simplify this as much as possible, the more the child was like an adult, the more likely it was that their blood pressure would have been picked up."

A young patient receives a blood pressure screening

In other words, doctors were more likely to catch the symptoms in children who are taller, older and heavier.  But Dr. Kaelber found children with normal weight and average height could also have high blood pressure.

Dr. Kaelber says his study should be a wake-up call for doctors to screen children for high blood pressure and take action before they develop other health complications. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

1 gender   

n.（生理上的）性，（名词、代词等的）性

参考例句：

• French differs from English in having gender for all nouns.法语不同于英语，所有的名词都有性。
• Women are sometimes denied opportunities solely because of their gender.妇女有时仅仅因为性别而无法获得种种机会。

2 literally   

adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实

参考例句：

• He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
• Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。