Prospective Associations of Accelerometer‐Assessed Physical Activity With Mortality and Incidence of Cardiovascular Disease Among Adults With Hypertension: The UK Biobank Study

Abstract

Background Despite the well‐established capacity of physical activity to reduce blood pressure, the associations between physical activity with cardiovascular disease (CVD) incidence and mortality in people living with hypertension are not well understood. We examine the dose‐response associations of device‐assessed physical activity with all‐cause and CVD mortality and CVD incidence (total, stroke, and coronary heart disease) in adults with hypertension. Methods and Results This prospective study included data from 39 294 participants with hypertension in the UK Biobank study who had valid accelerometry data and for whom mortality and CVD followed‐up data were available. We categorized moderate‐to‐vigorous physical activity and total physical activity volume into 4 categories based on the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles and used Cox regressions to estimate their associations with CVD mortality and incidence outcomes. Splines were used to assess the dose‐response associations. During a median follow‐up of 6.25 years (241 418 person‐years), 1518 deaths (549 attributable to CVD) and 4933 CVD (fatal and nonfatal) incident events were registered. Compared with the lowest category of moderate‐to‐vigorous physical activity, the relative risks (hazard ratios and 95% CIs) of all‐cause mortality for increasing categories were 0.53 (0.46–0.61), 0.41 (0.34–0.49), and 0.36 (0.26–0.49). We found associations of similar magnitude for total CVD incidence, stroke, and coronary heart disease; and for total physical activity volume across all outcomes. For all outcomes, there were linear or nearly linear inverse dose‐response relationships with no evidence of harms with high levels of physical activity. Results were robust to removing participants who died within the first 2 years. Conclusions Our findings underscore the importance of physical activity for people living with hypertension and provide novel insights to support the development of physical activity guideline recommendations for this high‐risk group.