[Risk profile of hypertensive patients]

Arterial hypertension is an important component of global cardiovascular risk profile of an individual patient. Estimation of global cardiovascular risk besides the blood pressure level incorporates all risk factors (RF), preclinical cardiovascular diseases (hypertension--induced target organ disease--TOD) and associated clinical conditions, and it should influence the therapy and long-term patient management. A group of metabolic risk factors comprizes several modifyable risk factors, detection of which influences the antihypertensive drug selection. The main goal of antihypertensive therapy is to achieve maximum reduction in the long-term total risk of cardiovascular disease, treating all modifyable risk factors in hypertensive patients.

In this work we present the results of group of 60 hypertensive patients examined for different risk factors detection and subsequent total cardiovascular risk estimation.

The mean number of risk factors per patient was 4,1 (3% of patients had two RF, 22% of patients had three RF, 37% patients had four factors and 38% patients had five RF present). The ischaemic heart disease was found more frequently among hypertensives with higher number of RF. Metabolic syndrom (MS) was present in 53% of patients. Hypertensives with MS have higher rate of RF (4.9 per person) comparing to thouse without MS (3.6 RF per person).

We found a quite high number of RF per individual hypertensive patient; the serious unfavourable consequence of this finding was the increased rate of coronary heart disease with the increasing number of risk factors found.