Prevalence of high blood pressure

There has been a great deal of discussion recently about the problems with various drugs for hypertension.  None of this discussion puts this disease into context.  Perhaps the greatest difficulty with hypertension is helping patients understand the concept of “saving now for retirement later.”  What I mean by that is the vast majority of patients have no symptoms from their hypertension yet the medicine can impart some problems.  If ignored by patients, hypertension can lead to heart, kidney and brain problems.  You don’t know it’s a problem until it’s too late.  If you take your medicine and “save now”  you can “retire” later because you won’t have had a stroke or be on dialysis or have heart difficulties.

An article published in JAMA titled US trends in prevalence, awareness, treatment and control of hypertension highlights these concerns.  This data was derived over the years 2007-2008.  It showed that only 50% of those treated had their pressure controlled.  This 50% number was significantly better than the 2000 number which was 31%.  The prevalence of hypertension in the population remains fairly constant at 29%.

Let’s do the math.  It’s estimated that 70 million people in the United States have hypertension; 20% don’t know they have it.  Of the remaining 80% or roughly 56 million people only 50% have their pressure adequately controlled.  It’s enough to give you hypertension thinking about it.  Clearly much more can and needs to be done.

One of the first efforts is to prevent the problem.  It is felt that many patients would not be hypertensive if they controlled their weight and salt intake. This salt restriction idea is getting a significant amount of press lately and New York city may make a big effort to ban salt just as they did smoking and the use of trans fats in cooking.  Just try getting a decent hot dog soon.

One last note. As I have often mentioned in these blogs, we as a nation are not getting any thinner.  Weight gain often brings on hypertension.  It is felt that we are using better drugs to offset the gains in weight that patients are presenting with and we as physicians are using more drugs to get patients “to goal.”  Help us out.  Lose weight, limit you salt intake, get some exercise, and don’t smoke.  You have heard it all before. 

Is it starting to sink in?

Tags: Drugs, Hypertension

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Cholesterol, Coronary Artery Disease, High Blood Pressure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.