Non-smokers (left) and smokers (right): both centre around 120.

Hypertension drives heart disease, so I asked which demographic and lifestyle factors move systolic blood pressure, using NHANES 2011-2012 survey data.

I pruned 16 candidate predictors for collinearity, compared stepwise AIC, stepwise BIC and LASSO models, and checked the winner’s diagnostics.

Age (+0.5 per year) and being male (+4.8) raised blood pressure; smoking showed no link (p = 0.96).