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High blood pressure, or hypertension, as doctors like to call it, affects more than 65 million adults in the United States and between 15 and 25 percent of the rest of the world, according to the World Health Organization.
This means that when you’re in a room with four other adults, one of the four of you probably has high blood pressure. One major problem is that a third of the people who have high blood pressure don’t know it; the disease is generally free of symptoms until it’s had time to do damage (over ten or more years).
And that’s why high blood pressure is often known as the silent killer. One source of optimism is that more than half of the other two-thirds who
know they have high blood pressure are now receiving adequate treatment. This means 16 percent of those who know they have high blood pressure are still inadequately treated and another 15 percent of them are untreated. Specialists don’t know exactly why there are still so many untreated and inadequately treated.
Translating percentages into numbers, around 41 million Americans are at risk from the complications of high blood pressure because of inadequate
treatment, no treatment, or lack of awareness that they have the disease.
The situation in most other countries is even worse. For decades, the crusade to bring this vast problem under control seemed to be making great progress because the occurrence of strokes seemed to be declining. Although that control deteriorated for a while as the frequency of strokes increased, now we’re headed in the right direction again.
The trouble is that the overall number of adults and children with high blood pressure is increasing as the population ages and gets heavier. Major investments of time, energy, and money are needed to deal with the millions of people still not receiving adequate blood pressure control. Like diabetes, high blood pressure is a lifestyle disease.