Modeling Large Values of Systolic Blood Pressure in the Portuguese Population

Abstract

It has been well stated that high values of blood pressure constitute a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases [20], with the latter being the number one death cause in Portugal. The main interest of the present study is to model the high values of systolic blood pressure in the individuals of the population who are most at risk, i.e., the elderly. This group frequently suffers from a specific type of hypertension pathology, known as isolated systolic hypertension. With that purpose the Peaks Over Threshold methodology was applied, which consists in fitting a generalized Pareto distribution to the excesses above a sufficiently high threshold. The model will be able to estimate extreme quantiles and tail probabilities.