More New Hypertension Guidelines -- But Is Anybody Listening?
The month of June saw publication of the first hypertension guidelines specifically aimed at the European populations. The new European Society of Cardiology (ESC)/European Society of Hypertension (ESH) guidelines take a noticeably different approach from the recently published US guidelines, "JNC 7 Express" (the Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure); specifically, they have not included a "prehypertension" category, they recommend no specific drug class as initial treatment, and they support the possibility of starting with combination therapy. On the other hand, bad news for all guidelines, including those for hypertension, came from a survey that found that patients in the United States are still receiving only a suboptimal percentage of the recommended care, and reservations about taking any antihypertensive drugs were recorded in a group of UK patients. Also from the United Kingdom came a proposal for a revolutionary approach to all cardiovascular disease, the "Polypill," a daily formulation of 6 drugs, including 3 antihypertensive agents, proposed for the prevention of heart disease and stroke. Just at press time, newly released NHANES data revealed that, reversing a decade of improvement, the incidence of hypertension has actually begun to increase in the United States, an "unacceptable" development. And finally, while waiting for implementation of all these new developments and discoveries, hypertension might be prevented by avoiding bullying bosses at work or argumentative spouses at home, according to researchers in the United Kingdom and United States, respectively.
The month of June saw publication of the first hypertension guidelines specifically aimed at the European populations. The new European Society of Cardiology (ESC)/European Society of Hypertension (ESH) guidelines take a noticeably different approach from the recently published US guidelines, "JNC 7 Express" (the Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure); specifically, they have not included a "prehypertension" category, they recommend no specific drug class as initial treatment, and they support the possibility of starting with combination therapy. On the other hand, bad news for all guidelines, including those for hypertension, came from a survey that found that patients in the United States are still receiving only a suboptimal percentage of the recommended care, and reservations about taking any antihypertensive drugs were recorded in a group of UK patients. Also from the United Kingdom came a proposal for a revolutionary approach to all cardiovascular disease, the "Polypill," a daily formulation of 6 drugs, including 3 antihypertensive agents, proposed for the prevention of heart disease and stroke. Just at press time, newly released NHANES data revealed that, reversing a decade of improvement, the incidence of hypertension has actually begun to increase in the United States, an "unacceptable" development. And finally, while waiting for implementation of all these new developments and discoveries, hypertension might be prevented by avoiding bullying bosses at work or argumentative spouses at home, according to researchers in the United Kingdom and United States, respectively.