One of the advantages of practicing clinical medicine, and seeing patients daily for many years, is you develop your own long-term study regarding certain medical health issues. In the area of hypertension, I have been taught by the best since my internship with pioneers such as Eliseo Perez Stable and Barry Materson at the University of Miami affiliated hospitals, Jackson Memorial Program, ensuring that their trainees were up to the task.
The goals and guidelines have changed. Lifestyle changes, including salt restriction (sodium chloride), weight reduction, smoking cessation, reducing alcohol intake, and regular exercise will always be mainstays of non-pharmacologic treatments. We used to be taught to keep the systolic blood pressure at less than 140 and the diastolic blood pressure at less than 85. These numbers have changed over the years, having been lowered, with everyone over 120 systolic now being classified as having some degree of increased risk of cardiac, cerebrovascular, or vascular disease and hypertension.
We originally were taught to start with a diuretic and keep raising the dosage until the blood pressure was controlled or the patient developed adverse effects. We learned that when we used one medication, pushing it to its limit inducing adverse effects along the way, patients just stopped taking their medications. This resulted in a change in strategy to using several medicines, each with another pathway to controlling blood pressure but all at a lower dosage, which did not produce any ill-feeling adverse effects. The downside of more medications was additional costs and more pills to remember to take. As hypertension experts pushed us to lower systolic blood pressure to 120 or less in our geriatric population, I was concerned that lowering the pressure that much would again create adverse effects that were as or more troublesome than the risk of having a BP between 120 and 140 systolic. An article in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at this issue. They looked at patients over 65 years of age who were hospitalized for non-cardiac related problems and whose blood pressure was over 120. They studied these patients at Veterans Administration hospitals over a two year period. Patients with elevated blood pressure above 120 were given more medications and higher dosages to bring their pressure down to meet the more stringent guidelines. The result was that there were no fewer cardiac events than anticipated and no better blood pressure control at a year. In addition, these patients suffered from an increased number of re-admissions to the hospital and “serious“ adverse events within 30 days.
The new guidelines for blood pressure control may be applicable in a younger, healthier population. In the geriatric population, we may need to readjust our goals to account for the physiologic changes that occur in men and women who age in a healthy manner. More specific data on why there were more re-admissions and what serious adverse effects occurred needs to be made public to determine if the effort to tightly control blood pressure is to blame.
Steven Reznick is an internal medicine physician and can be reached at Boca Raton Concierge Doctor.
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