A call to action and a lifecourse strategy to address the global burden of raised blood pressure on current and future generations: the Lancet Commission on hypertension

Elevated blood pressure is the strongest modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease worldwide. Despite extensive knowledge about ways to prevent as well as to treat hypertension, the global incidence and prevalence of hypertension and, more importantly, its cardiovascular complications are not reduced—partly because of inadequacies in prevention, diagnosis, and control of the disorder in an ageing world.

The aim of the Lancet Commission on hypertension is to identify key actions to improve the management of blood pressure both at the population and the individual level, and to generate a campaign to adopt the suggested actions at national levels to reduce the impact of elevated blood pressure globally. The first task of the Commission is this report, which briefly reviews the available evidence for prevention, identification, and treatment of elevated blood pressure, hypertension, and its cardiovascular complications. The report focuses on how as-yet unsolved issues might be tackled using approaches with population-wide impact and new methods for patient evaluation and education in the broadest sense (some of which are not always strictly evidence based) to manage blood pressure worldwide.

The report is built around the concept of lifetime risk applicable to the entire population from conception. Development of subclinical and sometimes clinical cardiovascular disease results from lifetime exposure to cardiovascular risk factors combined with the susceptibility of individuals to the harmful consequences of these risk factors. The Commission recognises the importance of other cardiovascular risk factors—eg, smoking, obesity, dyslipidaemia, and diabetes mellitus—on antihypertensive treatment. However, as a Commission on hypertension, this report focuses mainly on issues and actions related to elevated blood pressure.

Previous action plans for improving management of elevated blood pressure and hypertension have not yet provided adequate results. Therefore, the Commission has identified ten essential and achievable goals and ten accompanying, mutually additive, and synergistic key actions that—if implemented effectively and broadly—will make substantial contributions to the management of blood pressure globally. The Commission deliberately has not listed these complementary key actions by priority because the balance between strength of evidence, feasibility, and potential benefit could differ by country.