Is high blood pressure a late manifestation of the hypertension syndrome?

Because hypertension has generally been defined as a disease of elevated systolic and diastolic blood pressure, the goals of treating hypertension have been simply to normalize the blood pressure. It was believed that if normal blood pressure were achieved, patients with hypertension would experience significant reductions in the incidence of associated cardiovascular events. However, studies to assess cardiovascular events in patients with hypertension have repeatedly demonstrated that reducing blood pressure results in very impressive reductions in cerebrovascular disease but in reductions of only about 16% in coronary artery disease, which is far lower than what was statistically predicted from the reductions in blood pressure. Although there are probably several reasons for the poor rate of reductions in the incidence of coronary artery disease, one of the most compelling appears to be the realization that hypertension is not simply a disease of numbers but rather a complex inherited syndrome of cardiovascular risk factors, all of which contribute to the development of heart disease in these patients. Included in the hypertension syndrome are abnormalities of lipid profile and insulin resistance, changes in renal function, endocrine changes, obesity, abnormalities of coagulation factors, and changes in the structure and function of the left ventricle and of vascular smooth muscle in the vasculature. In many patients, high blood pressure is a late manifestation of this disease process and is preceded by some or all of the associated cardiovascular risk factors. This paradigm suggests that therapeutic strategies for hypertension should be interventions that target both the hemodynamic and nonhemodynamic mechanisms of this syndrome to more completely reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in patients with hypertension.