Establishment of hypertension risk nomograms based on physical fitness parameters for men and women: a cross-sectional study

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to establish hypertension risk nomograms for Chinese male and female adults, respectively. METHOD: A series of questionnaire surveys, physical assessments, and biochemical indicator tests were performed on 18,367 adult participants in China. The optimization of variable selection was conducted by running cyclic coordinate descent with 10-fold cross-validation through the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression. The nomograms were built by including the predictors selected through multivariable logistic regression. Calibration plots, receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC), decision curve analysis (DCA), clinical impact curves (CIC), and net reduction curve plots (NRC) were used to validate the models. RESULTS: Out of a total of 18 variables, 5 predictors—namely age, body mass index, waistline, hipline, and resting heart rate—were identified for the hypertension risk predictive model for men with an area under the ROC of 0.693 in the training set and 0.707 in the validation set. Seven predictors—namely age, body mass index, body weight, cardiovascular disease history, waistline, resting heart rate, and daily activity level—were identified for the hypertension risk predictive model for women with an area under the ROC of 0.720 in the training set and 0.748 in the validation set. The nomograms for both men and women were externally well-validated. CONCLUSION: Gender differences may induce heterogeneity in hypertension risk prediction between men and women. Besides basic demographic and anthropometric parameters, information related to the functional status of the cardiovascular system and physical activity appears to be necessary.