Blood pressure response to daily stress provides clues for better hypertension...(om their moms for long periods can't run...)

"This has a lot of implications for earlier detection of risk-increasing environmental exposures and what you can do about it," says Dr. Treiber, a clinical child psychologist and program project leader. "If you can't alter the environment that quickly in life, you know now where they are headed and maybe you can preempt it pharmacogenetically."

In the diverse group of some 600 young people he's been following for 17 years, Dr. Treiber has found that, as with the general population, some already are obese and/or hypertensive at the average age of 25. He'll continue to follow and annually assess them over the next five years in an effort to better understand how stress contributes to hypertension. "What we are doing is looking at chronic environmental stress in combination with some bad candidate genes that are stress activated," says Dr. Treiber. He's thinking that, as with rats, genetic predisposition and stress can doom people with normal pressures to hypertension. They'll look at blood pressure reactivity, recovery, sodium secretion, measure the footprints left by oxidative stress and the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. They'll look at early indicators of cardiovascular disease, such as enlargement of the pumping chamber of the heart and signs of carotid artery disease. "If you have a tendency to have high blood pressure or if you are obese, we can see the inner layer of the carotid getting thicker than normal people your age," says Dr. Gaston Kapuku, cardiologist and cardiovascular researcher at the Georgia Prevention Institute and a project core leader.

America's current obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic also has them looking at insulin, glucose and cholesterol levels and whether fat
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