Systolic Blood Pressure and Physical Fitness in Security Personnel: A Cross Sectional Study

Abstract

Background: According to the duty, security personnel must take care of their health especially their cardiovascular function to do their job optimally. Measuring systolic blood pressure is one of several ways to determine the cardiovascular condition that will affecting security personnel performance. Purpose: To find the correlation between systolic blood pressure and physical performance (determined by the result of Cooper 12-minutes running test as one component of Kesamaptaan Jasmani test) among security personnel in Faculty Medicine of Universitas Indonesia. Methods: 35 security personnel who the blood pressure already measured were taking Cooper 12-minutes running test. The data analysis then processed using SPSS Version 20 and the analysis was done analytically. The normality of the data was analyzed using Saphiro-Wilk and the correlation between the variables was analyzed using Pearson (if normal) or Spearman (if abnormal). Result: The analysis showed the distribution of the systolic pressure data is abnormal (p = 0.000). The correlation between the two variables then analyzed using Spearman method. The result shows there is a really weak correlation between systolic blood pressure and cardiorespiratory performance (correlation = -0.05). According to another study, systolic blood pressure has significant correlations with power, muscular endurance, agility, and VO2 max. However, the weak correlation in this study may be due to other factors that also affecting the result i.e. age, and level of physical activity. Conclusion: Future investigations must be done with more samples and there may be other factors affecting the Cooper test result that can be explained.