Uncontrolled Blood Pressure is Sending More People to the Hospital
upstart writes:
The increase occurred during a period when some studies reported overall progress in blood pressure control and a decline in related cardiovascular events in the U.S. The findings are published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
"Although more people have been able to manage their blood pressure over the last few years, we're not seeing this improvement translate into fewer hospitalizations for hypertensive crisis[*]," said Joseph E. Ebinger, MD, a clinical cardiologist and director of clinical analytics at the Smidt Heart Institute and first author of the study.
[...] To conduct their study, the investigators analyzed data from the National Inpatient Sample, a publicly available database. The data include a subset of all hospitalizations across the U.S., providing a picture of nationwide trends. They found that annual hospitalizations for hypertensive crises more than doubled over a 13-year period. Hospitalizations related to hypertensive crises represented 0.17% of all admissions for men in 2002 but 0.39% in 2014. Hospitalizations related to hypertensive crisis represented 0.16% of all admissions for women in 2002 but 0.34% in 2014.
The investigators estimated that from 2002 to 2014, there were 918,392 hospitalizations and 4,377 in-hospital deaths related to hypertensive crisis across the U.S.
The risk of dying from a hypertensive crisis, however, did decrease slightly overall during the studied time period. Women died at the same rate as men, even though they had fewer health issues than men who also were hospitalized for a hypertensive crisis.
[*] Hypertensive crisis on Wikipedia.
Journal Reference:
Joseph E. Ebinger, Yunxian Liu, PhD, MS, Matthew Driver, MPH et al. SexSpecific Temporal Trends in Hypertensive Crisis Hospitalizations in the United States, Journal of the American Heart Association (DOI: 10.1161/JAHA.121.021244)
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