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Samuel J. Mann, MD
New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center New York, NY

JAMA. 1994;271(13):979.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The notion that tension or anxiety is a predictor of hypertension has been assumed intuitively and has been studied by many over decades. Yet convincing evidence of such a relationship has not appeared. The recent article by Dr Markovitz and colleagues¹ purportedly demonstrates that anxiety levels predict development of hypertension in middle-aged men. However, the findings are open to question on several grounds.

First, there was no evidence of a relationship between tension and development of hypertension in women or in older men. Thus, in three of four groups tested, no relationship was seen. Further, the odds of a type I error are substantial. Given the number of subgroups, the number of predictors tested, and the stated P value of.04, there is a 39% likelihood of a chance association between some predictor and hypertension. For the .02 value reported with multivariate analysis, there is a 20% likelihood . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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