Kelly Samara da Silva1,2 and José Cazuza de Farias Júnior1,2 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

High levels of arterial blood pressure in childhood and adoles-cence have been often associated with other cardiovascular risk factors – apart from arterial hypertension in the adult stage of life. The present study aimed at identifying risk factors associated with high blood pressure in adolescents. The subjects were 674 ado-lescents from public and private schools in the city of João Pes-soa, Paraíba. These subjects were of both sexes (i.e., 303 boys and 371 girls) and their ages spanned from 14 to 17 years old. By means of a questionnaire, information about the following aspects was gathered: a) socio-demographic status; b) physical activity le-vels; c) eating habits; d) body mass index; e) consumption of alco-hol and smoking. Moreover, measurements of arterial pressure (AP) showed that the prevalence of high AP was 7.4%, being higher in boys (10.2%) when compared with girls (5.1%, p < 0.01). The re-sults of the multivaried analysis indicated that overweight adoles-cents displayed from five to six times more chance of having high AP than adolescents with light/normal weight (boys: OR = 5.5; CI 95 % = 1.11-27.53, and girls: OR = 4.8; CI 95 % = 1.51-15.45). The other variables did not seem to be associated with high AP. In this study, among the various risk factors analyzed, body overweight acted out as the only potential risk factor increasing arterial blood pressure in adolescents, irrespective of their sex and age