Radial Pulse Wave Signals Combined with Ba-PWV for the Risk Prediction of Hypertension and the Monitoring of Its Accompanying Metabolic Risk Factors

Our aim was to study whether radial pulse wave signals can improve the risk prediction of incident hypertension and are associated with its concomitant metabolic risk factors beyond the traditional cardiovascular risk factor Ba-PWV. By enrolling 523 Chinese subjects in this study, linear and stepwise regression analysis was performed to assess the association of radial artery pulse wave signals and Ba-PWV with blood pressure and its related metabolic risk factors such as fasting plasma glucose (FPG), total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), and uric acid (UA). The area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (AUC), net reclassification improvement (NRI), and integrated discrimination improvement (IDI) were calculated by risk assessment plot to compare the discriminative ability among models with and without radial artery pulse wave signals. After adjusting related confounding factors, radial artery pulse wave variable h(3)/h(1) was selected as the sensitive influential factor for blood pressure. Moreover, a new model with h(3)/h(1) had a higher AUC than the reference model without it (0.86 vs 0.84; P=0.030). And the NRI and IDI for the new model was 50.0% (P=0.017) and 3.16% (P=0.044), respectively. In addition to Ba-PWV, we found that the decrease of t(4), t(5), and h(5) might be associated with higher FPG, TC, LDL-C, and UA and lower HDL-C. This research might provide a valuable additional tool for remote wearable monitoring of radial artery pulse wave signals in hypertension risk evaluation and management.