Long cell phone conversations increase blood pressure, study finds

 Chinese scientists have learned that talking on a mobile phone for 30 minutes or more per week is associated with an increased risk of hypertension.

They presented their findings in the European Heart Journal Digital Health.

Almost three-quarters of the world's population aged 10 and over have mobile phones. Approximately 1.3 billion people between the ages of 30 and 79 suffer from hypertension. High blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart attack and stroke, which is the leading cause of premature death in the world.

Scientists from the National Center for Clinical Research on Kidney Diseases (China) decided to find out if there is a connection between hypertension and talking on a mobile phone. For this, they used data from the British Biobank, which included 212,046 people aged 37 to 73.

The researchers collected information about how often the subjects used mobile phones using a special program that takes into account the number of hours of mobile phone calls per week.

Adjustments were made for age, sex, body mass index, race, family history of hypertension, education, smoking status, blood cholesterol and glucose levels, kidney function, medication use, and other risk factors for high blood pressure.

The average age of the participants was 54 years, 62 percent of them were women, and 88 percent used mobile phones. Over 12 years of observation, 13,984 people developed hypertension. It turned out that those participants who talked on the phone for 30 minutes or more per week were 12 percent more likely to develop hypertension on average than those who spent less time on it.

Specifically, the scientists found out: a weekly conversation on the phone from 30 to 59 minutes increases the risk of developing hypertension by eight percent, one to three hours by 13, four to six hours by 16, and more than six hours by 25 percent. At the same time, the possibility of developing hypertension was higher in those participants who already had the disease in their family history.

The results were the same for both women and men.