2025 Annual Report

PATIENT CARE PATIENT CARE, QUALITY & SAFETY

REDUCING HYPERTENSION NUMBERS IN CHILDREN— AND ADULTS

Successfully stemming rising rates of cardiovascular disease in adults needs to start in childhood. But with mounting numbers of children and adolescents developing high blood pressure—a trend driven largely by skyrocketing obesity rates—this objective is getting harder to achieve. Enter the Pediatric Hypertension Program at Children’s of Alabama, which, with its steady growth, seeks to break the cycle.

2 , 200 Children from across Alabama, eastern Mississippi and western Georgia receive ongoing care with the Children’s Hypertension Program 70 , 000 Young people with high blood pressure across Alabama, eastern Mississippi and western Georgia are undiagnosed

The Hypertension Clinic, which operates three half-days each week, now sees about 45 patients weekly, a 10-fold increase from 14 years ago, says Daniel Feig, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Pediatric Nephrology at Children’s, who was recruited in 2011 to oversee the clinic’s development and expansion. High blood pressure—defined in adults and children 13 years and older as a reading of 130/80 mm Hg or higher—is relatively unusual in healthy young patients, affecting 2-3% of typical children and adolescents. (For younger children, the definition of hypertension is a statistical one, based on greater than 95th percentile for age, sex and height.) But children with obesity—who account for nearly 20% of all Americans under 18—have a 20-30% rate of hypertension, says Feig, also the Margaret Porter Professor of Pediatrics at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

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CHILDREN’S OF ALABAMA | UAB MEDICINE