Concomitant Risk Factor of Atherosclerosis in Hypertensive Subjects

Background

Much of the recent understanding of hypertensive has focused on the importance of concomitant atherosclerotic risk factors in addition to the blood pressure itself and has created new therapeutic challenges.

Methods and Results

We conducted a prospective study to determine the prevalence rates of hyperlipidemia, smoking, diabetes, obesity and left ventricular hypertrophy(LVH) in 185 hypertensive subjects. Serum levels of total cholesterol, triglyceride and HDL-cholesterol were measured by enzymatic method.

1) Mean values of serum total cholesterol, triglyceride, HDL-cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and atherogenic index were not significantly different between sex and resident area.

2) The most frequent risk factor in hypertensive subjects was overweight, followed by M-mode echocardiographic LVH, hypertriglyceridemia, high LDL-cholesterol levels, low HDL-cholesterol levels, hypertriglyceridemia, electrocardiographic LVH, and diabetes.

3) The prevalence rates of both total cholesterol levels over 240mg/dl and LDL-cholesterol over 160mg/dl were about 20%, regardless of sex and resident area.

Conclusion

These results indicate that hypertensive subjects have many concomitant risk factors of atherosclerosis. Hypercholesterolemia(≥200 mg/dl), M-mode echocardiographic LVH and overweight among the selected risk factors were observed in more than a half of the hypertensive subjects, regardless of sex and resident area. These findings suggest that for the effective management of hypertensive subjects, physician should not only treat hypertension itself, but also control the concomitant risk factors.