Transcript of video
In the US, 30% of people have hypertension. 30% of people have hypertension and don’t know about it. 50% of the people with high blood pressure do not have good control of hypertension to 140/90 target goal of treatment. Leading hypertension expert. Hypertension is a global problem. In the US 1/3 of patients have hypertension. 1/3 of patients have hypertension and don’t know about it. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Almost half of the patients do not have good control of hypertension. There is UK data that shows that almost 90% of patients do not have control of hypertension to the 140 over 90 [recommended blood pressure target]. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Why hypertension continues to be such a problem today? Dr. Ehud Grossman, MD. Hypertension’s name is “silent killer” because you don’t feel when your blood pressure is high. It causes all the damage to the organs. So if you don’t feel bad. You don’t go to the doctor. You may be not convinced to get treatment of high blood pressure. So this is a problem #1 with hypertension. Problem #2 is that we have enough medications to lower the blood pressure. But then patients have side effects. Patients do not all tolerate the anti-hypertension medications. Problem #3. Even if you are convinced that you have to take the medications, if you don’t suffer from hypertension symptoms. You forget to take medications. So you have to take every day three or four medications to lower the blood pressure. But you don’t feel something is wrong with you. Then you forget to take the medications. So the main problem with control of blood pressure is what we call “noncompliance”. Dr. Ehud Grossman, MD. This means that you don’t take the medications as requested. Or you maybe have side effects. That’s why you don’t take medications. So we still have a problem to treat hypertension. We didn’t find the good solution for all patients. I believe that a patient must comply with the treatment. You know how to treat hypertension. You can control 90% of the patients. Now the main problem is this. Recent American guidelines for hypertension define the lower blood pressure target than 140 over 90. New blood pressure target is now 130 over 80. If we adhere to this target, I believe that at least 50% of patients with hypertension will not have good blood pressure control. Perhaps even more patients. This is despite anti-hypertensive medications. So hypertension is still killer #1. The main point is that hypertension is a modifiable risk factor. If you treat the high blood pressure well, you can prevent many problems in the future. Dr. Ehud Grossman, MD. So that’s why we have to fight and explain and convince patients how important it is to lower the blood pressure. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. That’s why the patient education continues to be one of the major goals. Educating patients is crucial. They must know how serious and how dangerous it is to have the high blood pressure. Even though they don’t feel it. People say. “I don’t feel bad so I probably have no high blood pressure”. But it is not true. You can have a very high blood pressure levels and you will feel nothing. So it’s very important to measure the blood pressure in order to know what is your real blood pressure.