A note on the measurement of hypertension in HHANES

Using data from the HHANES, we found the rates of elevated blood pressure readings on clinical examination to be extremely low for a sample of Mexican American and Puerto Rican women. The prevalence rates were one-fourth to one-fifth the rates found for a comparable sample of White women from NHANESII. These findings are discrepant with the little that is known about hypertension prevalence among Hispanics and with estimates of hypertension prevalence for Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans drawn from NHANESII. While our HHANES samples women had much lower rates of clinical high blood pressure than Whites, they reported hypertension histories in excess of Whites. Rates of medicine usage among Hispanics were insufficiently large for effective treatment to explain the disparity. The prevalence estimates increased, but the relative discrepancies remained when we altered our sample specifications and clinical high blood pressure measure. A possible explanation for these discrepancies is that few physicians performed the majority of blood pressure readings in our HHANES sample. This may have been statistically inefficient. The discrepancies noted suggest that HHANES may not be a reliable source of information on hypertension among Hispanic women.