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BY OUR PHARMA CORRESPONDENT
10 August, 2005: If prehypertension --blood pressure just above the normal levels-- can be eliminated, we could potentially prevent about 47 per cent of all heart attacks, says a study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Normal blood pressure is lower than 120/80 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg). Prehypertension is systolic blood pressure between 120 and 139 and/or diastolic pressure between 80 and 89 mm Hg. (Systolic pressure is the force in the arteries when the heart beats and diastolic pressure is the force when the heart is at rest.) Hypertension is blood pressure 140/90 mm Hg or higher.
Researchers prefer to refer this as a gray zone, where you are not hypertensive but your blood pressure is not normal either.
More than a year ago, a national committee coined the term "prehypertension" for this gray area. But until this study, physicians and the public knew little about what this term meant. About 59 million people in the United States are prehypertensive.
Researchers examined existing data from the Framingham Study and found that a prehypertensive person is more than three times more likely to have a heart attack and 1.7 times more likely to have heart disease than a person with normal blood pressure.
They did not find a significantly increased risk of stroke among those with prehypertension. "This is somewhat surprising, but it may be related to the small number of stroke events in the study," researchers notes, "The differential effect in this gray zone may be mediated through factors other than blood pressure, such as insulin resistance."
Researchers also investigated the population's attributable risk, which determines how a disease will be impacted if that risk factor were eliminated.
While classical recommendations of lifestyle modifications such as weight control, regular physical activity and changes in diet for people with prehypertension, these findings raise the question of whether the treatment for prehypertensive patients should be followed more aggressively, they opined.
BY OUR PHARMA CORRESPONDENT
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