This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Richard B. Devereux, MD

JAMA. 1990;264(21):2798-2799.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

High blood pressure is a strong risk factor for cardiovascular disease, but the incidence of morbid events is low for most individuals with hypertension and is not evenly distributed among them. Consequently, treatment guided solely by blood pressure levels may not be sufficiently intensive for high-risk patients, while patients at low risk may be exposed to drug side effects without deriving benefit. This situation may have contributed to the disappointing results of studies of antihypertensive drugs. Although high-risk patients can be identified by traditional measures such as electrocardiographic left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy, fewer than 1% of adults had this abnormality in a recent report from Framingham.¹

This situation has been altered by the development of accurate noninvasive methods of measuring LV muscle mass² and carotid atherosclerosis.³ Studies of patients with hypertension from Cornell^4,5 and middle-aged and older members of the general population in Framingham^1,6 have . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Department of Medicine, The New York (NY) Hospital—Cornell Medical Center.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to Division of Cardiology, Box 222, The New York Hospital—Cornell Medical Center, 525 E 68th St, New York, NY 10021 (Dr Devereux).

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?