Letting the Dust Settle on New Hypertension Guidelines

The April 2015 edition of Cardiology Today includes an interesting article – “New Hypertension Recommendations Anticipated in 2016” - stating that the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC), in collaboration with nine other medical societies, will be releasing new hypertension guidelines that will serve as an update to those released by the Seventh Joint National Committee (JNC 7) in 2003.

But, wait…weren’t updated guidelines already published back in 2013? As a matter of fact, they were!

Discussed in a previous blog, two additional guidelines were published at that time; one from the Eighth Joint National Committee (JNC 8) and the other as a result of a joint effort by the American Society of Hypertension (ASH) and the International Society of Hypertension (ISH), discussed here.

However, the updates released in 2013 have created discussion within the cardiology community. In the March 2014 edition of Cardiology Today, three physicians share their comments in this article which describes the “flurry of guidelines, which offer different recommendations on BP targets.”

It will certainly be interesting to see how the guidelines released by AHA/ACC and collaborators in 2016 differ from those published previously. Let us know your thoughts on what changes you anticipate seeing after the dust settles on the newest hypertension guidelines.