New Opportunities for Monitoring Blood Pressure Control and Awareness in the Population: Insights from 12-Year Editions of the World Hypertension Day

Excerpt

It has been widely reported that hypertension prevalence has been continuously and progressively growing during the last decades worldwide, due to ageing of the population, improved survival after cardiovascular events, environmental factors and ameliorated socio-economic condition of the population in large regions of the planet. However, levels of blood pressure (BP) control in treated hypertensive patients have been substantially unchanged for years, ranging between approximately 33–47 % in most European countries [1], despite an improved awareness of the disease. In Italy, analysis of observational studies and clinical surveys performed in various clinical settings during 10-year observational period (2000–2011) showed that only 37 % of treated hypertensive patients achieved the recommended BP targets [2]. According to these reports, in the last few years several interventions have been undertaken at various levels for improving BP control rates in our Country, as well as in other parts of the world. All these educational and clinical interventions shared several common features, mostly the systematic and thorough assessment of the secular trends in prevalence, awareness, treatment and control of hypertension in the general population and the progressive and extended involvement of general practitioners (and their medical databases) in the clinical management of hypertension. This large amount of data can be used to provide a rough estimation of the burden of hypertension in various Countries in a setting of real life. …