High waist circumference is a risk factor of new‐onset hypertension: Evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study

This study aims to investigate the association between waist circumference and the development of hypertension based on a nationwide cohort Chinese population. A total of 5330 individuals free of hypertension at baseline were collected from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. The association between waist circumference and the development of hypertension was analyzed by an adjusted cox regression model and visualized by restricted cubic splines. Further, we applied the supervised machine learning methods to evaluate the importance of multiple variates for new‐onset hypertension. Additionally, the robustness of the association was assessed by a subgroup analysis. A total of 1490 individuals (28.0%) developed hypertension during a mean follow‐up of 3.32 years. The new‐onset hypertension was more observed in those with increased waist circumference (P for trend < .001). In the fully adjusted Cox regression, each 10 cm increase of waist circumference would result in an 18% elevated risk of hypertension. The random forest method and the Extreme Gradient Boosting method revealed waist circumference as an important feature to predict the development of hypertension. The sensitivity analysis indicated a consistent trend between waist circumference and new‐onset hypertension in all BMI categories. This study suggested high waist circumference as an independent risk factor for new‐onset hypertension based on a nationwide cohort of Chinese adults aged ≥45 years old. Our results supported that waist circumference should be routinely measured.