Blood pressure highly likely to cause anxiety and depression: Study

High blood pressure is a major risk for cardiovascular disease and thought to be associated with psychological factors, such as anxiety, depression, and neuroticism-a personality trait characterized by susceptibility to negative emotions, including anxiety and depression.

But which causes which isn't entirely clear.

In a bid to find out, the researchers used a technique called Mendelian randomization. This uses genetic variants as proxies for a particular risk factor-in this case, blood pressure-to obtain genetic evidence in support of a causal relationship, reducing the biases inherent in observational studies.

They found that diastolic blood pressure-the lower of the two numbers in a blood pressure reading-is highly likely to cause neurotic personality trait, The findings have been published in journal General Psychiatry.

And keeping it under control can help curb neurotic behaviors, anxiety, and heart and circulatory diseases, conclude the researchers.

Between 30% and 60% of blood pressure is down to genetic factors, and over 1000 genetic single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs for short, are associated with it. SNPs help predict a person's response to certain drugs, susceptibility to environmental factors, and their risk of developing diseases.

The researchers drew on 8 large-scale study datasets containing whole genome DNA extracted from blood samples from people of predominantly European ancestry (genome-wide association studies).

They applied Mendelian randomization to the 4 traits of blood pressure-systolic blood pressure (736,650 samples), diastolic blood pressure (736,650), pulse pressure (systolic minus diastolic blood pressure; 736,650), and high blood pressure (above 140/90 mm Hg; 463,010) with 4 psychological states-anxiety (463,010 samples), depressive symptoms (180,866), neuroticism (170,911) and subjective wellbeing (298,420).

The analysis revealed that high blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure had significant causal effects on neuroticism, but not on anxiety, depressive symptoms, or subjective wellbeing.

But after adjusting for multiple tests, only diastolic blood pressure was significantly associated with neuroticism (over 90%), based on 1074 SNPs.

Reference:

Cai L, Liu Y, He L, Investigating genetic causal relationships between blood pressure and anxiety, depressive symptoms, neuroticism and subjective well-being, General Psychiatry, 2022;35:e100877. DOI 10.1136/gpsych-2022-100877.