Blood pressure in haemophilia and its relation to clotting factor usage
Srila Gopal
Orcid profile, Richard FW Barnes
Orcid profile, Doris V Quon
Orcid profile, , and Annette von Drygalski
- Hemophilia and Thrombosis Treatment Center, Department of Medicine, University of California San DiegoSan Diego, USA
- Department of Molecular Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute, Department of Molecular MedicineLa Jolla, USA
Orcid profile 
Article Category: Clinical Research
Published Online: Dec 23, 2019
Page range: 42 - 50
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17225/jhp00147
Keywords
© 2019 Srila Gopal, Richard FW Barnes, Doris V Quon, Hao Wei (Linda) Sun, Shannon Jackson, Annette von Drygalski, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Background
Patients with haemophilia have a higher prevalence of hypertension than the general population that cannot be explained by traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as age, race, diabetes or obesity. Patients with severe haemophilia, who are on clotting factor prophylaxis, have a higher prevalence of hypertension compared to patients with milder forms of haemophilia, who infuse clotting factor less frequently. This raises the question of whether there is a link between clotting factor usage and blood pressure in haemophilia patients.
Methods
Data was collected from 193 patients with severe haemophilia presenting to three haemophilia treatment centres in the United States and Canada, including age, body mass index (BMI), blood pressure (BP), Hepatitis C (HCV) and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection status, and clotting factor usage from pharmacy prescriptions (units/kg/year). The correlation between BP and factor usage was examined using quantile regression models.
Results
Systolic and diastolic BP plotted against factor use showed a cone-shaped scatter of points. There was no association between clotting factor usage and higher systolic or diastolic BP.
Conclusion
Our observations provide no evidence for an association between increased clotting factor usage and high BP.