Unmet needs in hypertension: challenges and opportunities

On the verge of the new millennium, hypertension remains an area of significant unmet medical need. Although progress has been made in the awareness, treatment, and control of hypertension during the last half of the 20th century, recent trends suggest that progress has stalled. Unfavorable trends in awareness and control have been noted by researchers at the Mayo Clinic, in a community that is socioeconomically prosperous with easy access to primary and tertiary medical care. Evidence suggests that a renewed focus on systolic blood pressure and on efforts to maintain compliance will result in better outcomes in populations at risk. Hiatt and Goldman have presented the case for "making medicine more scientific"--that is, understanding how the application of medical care advances can best be applied to benefit population health status. This is the challenge that hypertension control presents in world populations. Aging societies make this challenge an urgent concern.