Background: Over 5 million older Americans are victims of financial exploitation, schemes, and/or scams per year. Such victimization is associated with increased hospitalizations, admittance to skilled nursing facilities, and lower 5-year all-cause mortality survival rates. Despite this, associations with medical comorbidities like elevated blood pressure (BP) have not been examined.
Methods: We investigated the association of self-reported fraud victimization (presence/absence) with objectively measured BP metrics leveraging cross-sectional and longitudinal data from over 1200 non-demented adults (75% female; age ~81 years) from the Rush Memory and Aging Project. We first examined cross-sectional associations between baseline fraud victimization and BP, then used longitudinal data to test the hypothesis that fraud victimization is associated with increases in BP after incident fraud. During up to 11 years of annual observation, participants were queried for fraud victimization and underwent serial BP measurements to calculate per visit averages of systolic and diastolic BP, mean arterial pressure (MAP), and pulse pressure.
Results: Cross-sectional analyses established that fraud victimization at baseline was associated with higher BP values. Next, using longitudinal changepoint analyses, we showed that fraud victimization was associated with elevations in BP among men but not women. Specifically, men who reported incident fraud exhibited increases in all BP metrics post-fraud.
Conclusion: Results suggest an important link between fraud victimization and BP, particularly among men. Older men showed significant elevations in BP after incident fraud that, compounded over time, may portend other adverse health outcomes.
Keywords: aging; blood pressure; fraud victimization.
© 2022 The American Geriatrics Society.