If you are a drinker, when and in what situations you drink may affect your blood pressure, findings of a UB study presented in Toronto earlier this month at the Society for Epidemiology Research have shown.

Tiejian Wu, research assistant professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has found that men and women who drink daily and those who drink outside of mealtime have a higher prevalence of hypertension than persons with other, different drinking patterns.

Wu measured blood pressure and collected information on alcohol consumption from a randomly selected study population of 1,057 men and 1,422 women in Western New York. Hypertension was defined as having a systolic pressure-the first number in a blood pressure reading-of 140 or higher, and diastolic pressure, the second number, of 90 or higher.

Analyzing blood pressure readings along with drinking-pattern information showed that the prevalence of high blood pressure was highest among the daily drinkers-39.3 percent-compared to 29.7 percent for abstainers and 30.9 percent for those who didn't drink during the past month and 26.3 percent for non-daily drinkers.

Of those who drank only outside of meals, 35 percent had high blood pressure, compared to 25.3 percent for people who drank with meals. Nearly 30 percent of the people in the "mixed" category were hypertensive.

When Wu considered only those who had consumed alcohol during the past month and took the amount consumed into account, there was little difference between daily and non-daily drinkers in the prevalence of hypertension. However, the difference remained significant between those who drank with and without meals.