Physiopathology of high blood pressure

Abstract

Raising blood pressure figures above normal values is one of the most frequently observed health problems in the population that doctors have to deal with on a daily basis. Each year a considerable number of new individuals join the group of hypertensive people that exist in the population.
In relation to the person affected, the National Health System has a responsibility to detect it throughout life. In this way the risk of complication and death presented decreases considerably.
Since the 1950s, Arterial Hypertension (HTA) has been known to be involved in increasing cardiovascular morbidity. Studies in the 1960s and 1970s clearly showed the relationship between HTA and deaths from vascular complications in the white organs: heart, brain, kidney and blood vessels. As a result, there was a great stimulus to research on epidemiological and basic aspects, such as its pathological mechanisms.
HTA has been considered to be due to abnormal regulation of multiple factors and systems, without the basic alteration of any of them. According to WHO data, HTA should be seen as a priority health problem in the Americas, with enormous social and economic implications.
An appreciable number of patients, when seeking medical care by HTA or are detected by the health team in care facilities, already have complications and damage to the white organs which is partly explained by the absence of symptomatology in their early stages.