The recent study data suggested that monitoring blood pressure and prescribing health promotion interventions may be warranted among people with OA to mitigate the potential onset and adverse consequences of hypertension. Osteoarthritis (OA) in the large weight-bearing joints, such as in knee, is countered as a most popular type of arthritis and one of the leading cause of disability globally.
Various research, done before has shown an association between osteoarthritis and cardiovascular disease. But it is still not clear if there is increased risk of developing hypertension in people suffering from osteoarthritis.

Therefore, this current study was aimed to find out this uncertainity. For this study data of the Osteoarthritis Iniative was used. It is an ongoing public and private longitudinal survey including people at higher risk of osteoarthritis or having knee osteoarthritis. Knee osteoarthritis was defined through radiological and clinical assessment. Incident hypertension was described as systolic blood pressure >140 mmHg and a diastolic value >90 mmHg.

Multivariate Cox's regression analyses were performed, which revealed the presence of knee osteoarthritis as the exposure and incident hypertension as the outcome during a 96-month follow-up interval. Around 3,558 people having normal blood pressure values at baseline were analysed (1,930 OA / 1,628 controls).

The findings estimated that within the follow-up interval, the incidence of hypertension was noted as significantly higher in people suffering from knee osteoarthritis as compared to those without (60/ vs 55/1,000 persons/years; p<0.0001). It was observed, that after adjusting for 13 confounders, knee osteoarthritis patients had a 13% higher chance of developing hypertension (Hazard ratio = 1.13; 95%CI: 1.01-1.26, p=0.03). Propensity score analysis did not alter these conclusions.

The study is concluded as the first longitudinal data analysis to demonstrate that people with knee osteoarthritis are having more chance of developing hypertension compared to those without osteoarthritis.