Type A behavior pattern and hypertension among inner-city black women.
Inner-city Black women were administered Rosenman and Friedman's A-B interview and invited to discuss stress experiences and traditional coronary heart disease risk factors while their blood pressure was monitored at two-minute intervals. Results revealed the essential reliability of the A-B classification for the sample and demonstrated a general congruence with type A behaviors reported in previous (mostly white male) samples. While type A Black women were not significantly more likely to be hypertensive than type B women, analyses of the intrasubject blood pressure variability revealed an interaction between A-B and hypertensive-normotensive status. Consistent with earlier findings, hypertensives were more variable than normotensives, but this was true only for type Bs; type As were intermediate and not differentiated in their variability. This finding calls attention to the possible adaptive function of type A behavior among stress inner-city Black females and raises the question of whether Rosenman and Friedman's personality theory might be objectionably simplistic.
D000328:Adult; D044383:Black People; D002641:Chicago; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006973:Hypertension / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D010551:Personality; D014505:Urban Population; D014930:Women; D001741:Black or African American