Effects of Prehypertension on Admissions and Deaths

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Abstract
On May 14, 2003, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute released new clinical practice guidelines for high blood pressure. The Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (JNC 7) was published a week later in The Journal of the American Medical Association.1 The guidelines caught the attention of clinicians and the media with 2 changes in particular: they emphasized that systolic blood pressure (SBP), not diastolic BP, was the treatment target, and they defined a new category, “prehypertension,” which includes persons whose SBPs are 120 to 139 mm Hg; frank hypertension begins at 140 mm Hg. Systolic blood pressures in this range were previously considered normal. The new category includes 22% of American adults (approximately 45 million persons).2