| Summary: | NICE first issued guidance for the management of hypertension in primary care in 2004. This was followed by a rapid update of the pharmacological treatment chapter of the guideline in 2006. The current partial update of the hypertension guideline is in response to the regular five year review cycle of existing NICE guidance. It began with a scoping exercise which identified key areas of the existing guideline for which new evidence had emerged that was likely to influence or change existing guideline recommendations. Sections of the guideline that have not been updated continue to stand, however, wherever NICE has subsequently issued new and related guidance relevant to existing recommendations, these have been identified and cross-referred to in this partial update, examples include interventions on lifestyle factors and public health policy recommendations such as smoking cessation, dietary salt restriction, alcohol intake and cardiovascular disease prevention and cardiovascular disease risk assessment. In addition, new NICE guidance developed in areas relevant to hypertension are also highlighted and cross referenced (for example, chronic kidney disease, stroke, diabetes and hypertension in pregnancy). The recommendations that have been reviewed in this partial update of the guideline for the clinical management of primary hypertension in adults, include; blood pressure measurement for the diagnosis of hypertension; blood pressure thresholds for intervention with drug therapy and blood pressure targets for treatment; specific aspects of the recommendations for the pharmacological treatment of hypertension; the treatment of hypertension in the very elderly (people aged greater than 80 years); dilemmas surrounding decision making for treatment of hypertension in younger adults (less than 40 years); the treatment of drug resistant hypertension; and wherever appropriate, the impact of age and ethnicity on treatment recommendations
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