New hypertension guidelines could save patients a huge amount of both lives and money.
The findings suggest the full implementation of these new guidelines could prevent as much as 56,000 cardiovascular disease events and 13,000 deaths every year without increasing healthcare costs, Columbia University Medical Center reported.
"Our findings clearly show that it would be worthwhile to significantly increase spending on office visits, home blood pressure monitoring, and interventions to improve treatment adherence," said lead author Andrew E. Moran, the Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Medicine at CUMC and a physician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia. "In fact, we could double treatment and monitoring spending for some patients-namely those with severe hypertension-and still break even."
The new guidelines, released by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, can be less aggressive for some patients and shifts treatments to focus more heavily on higher blood pressures; this means fewer patients need treatment.
To determine the benefit of these relaxed guidelines the researchers ran a computer simulation that estimated the "cost of treatment, savings from reductions in cardiovascular disease (CVD) treatment, and quality-of-life gains" in U.S. adults between the ages of 35 and 74.
"Given rising health care costs and limited budgets, it's important to determine the cost-effectiveness of implementing the new guidelines and whether we should focus on specific patient subgroups," said study leader Lee Goldman, Harold and Margaret Hatch Professor of the University and dean of the faculties of health sciences and medicine at CUMC.
The findings showed that it is not cost-effective to treat hypertension in many young adults, especially women. The researchers did note since the analysis did not look at the lifetime effects of hypertension, this finding might not be entirely correct. The researchers hope to conduct further studies to help clear up these issues.
"The overall message of our study is that every segment of our health care system, from small medical practices to large insurance companies, can benefit by improving treatment of hypertension," Moran concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
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