Risks of prehypertension are starting to come out

Filed in archive Studies on August 5, 2005

Prehypertension is systolic blood pressure between 120 and 139 and/or diastolic pressure between 80 and 89 mm Hg. Various trials are starting to show that people in this class are at higher cardiovascular risk:

More than a year ago, a national committee coined the term "prehypertension" for this gray area. But until this study, Qureshi said, 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.

("Prehypertension triples heart attack risk", Medical News Today, Aug.5)