Canada and the United States have the fewest patients, at less than 20 percent of adults, but in poorer countries like Niger the estimated figure is closer to 50 percent, the UN body said.

While wealthier countries have seen their cases drop thanks to effective, low-cost treatment, in Africa many remain people undiagnosed and are not getting help, according to the WHO.

Its World Health Statistics report includes figures on raised blood pressure, and also on blood glucose levels, for the first time this year.

In a study of more than 6,000 people, those who had a parent with high blood pressure but were highly fit had a 34 percent lower risk of developing high blood pressure themselves, compared to those with a low-fitness level who had the same parental history.

“Understanding the roles that family history and fitness play in chronic diseases is critically important,” said Robin P. Shook, M.S., study lead author and a doctoral graduate student in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. “The results of this study send a very practical message, which is that even a very realistic, moderate amount of exercise - which we define as brisk walking for 150 minutes per week - can provide a huge health benefit, particularly to people predisposed to hypertension because of their family history.”

In as little as 30 seconds per artery, the Vessix V2 System performs a one-time minimally invasive catheter-based percutaneous procedure shown to significantly reduce blood pressure.

This new technology has the potential to help the one in three adults in the United States who suffer from hypertension - a condition more common than cancer, diabetes, and coronary artery disease combined. Today, anti-hypertensive drugs are the primary treatment for hypertension. But despite the widespread use of drugs, only about half of hypertensive patients around the world are well controlled, even when multiple medications are taken at optimal dosages. A change is now underway.

The V2 System performs a new procedural treatment called renal denervation, which Dr. Mehmet Oz has called ???a profound game changer.??? It uses a short blast of radiofrequency (RF) energy to disable the nerves surrounding the arteries leading to the kidneys, treating one of the key physiological contributors to hypertension.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey in 2009 and 2010 revealed a 27 percent decline over 10 years in the percentage of adults with high cholesterol, a major risk factor for heart disease that is the leading cause of death in the United States.

A similar survey conducted in 1999 and 2000 showed that 18.3 percent of adults had high total cholesterol.

The CDC survey did not study the causes of the decrease in high cholesterol. Likely factors include better diet, increased exercise and increased use of drugs that lower cholesterol levels, CDC epidemiologist Cynthia Ogden told Reuters,

In a Swedish study published in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke, people who drank low-fat milk and ate low-fat yogurt and cheese had a lower risk of stroke compared to those who consumed full-fat dairy foods.

Among 74,961 adults 45 to 83 years old, those who ate low-fat dairy foods had a 12 percent lower risk of stroke and a 13 percent lower risk of ischemic stroke than those who ate high-fat dairy foods.

Participants were free of heart disease, stroke and cancer at the start of the study. All completed a 96-item food and beverage questionnaire to determine dietary habits. Food and drink consumption frequency was divided into eight categories, ranging from never to four servings per day.

The study, carried out over 9.3 years, evaluated the risk of different blood pressure categories among 6,273 participants aged 30 years old and above. The results showed that the risk of developing incident CVD and CHD was significantly higher in people with high normal blood pressure during middle-age (between 30 and 60 years of age) than for people with the same high normal blood pressure aged 60 years and older. Incident CVD and CHD risk was, however, similarly high in people with diagnosed high blood pressure across all age-groups.

“These results reinforce the fact that high blood pressure is a serious risk for CVD in all age groups,” said Dr. F. Hadaegh, Prevention of Metabolic Disorders Research Center, Tehran, Iran. “However, the results also suggest that when looking to manage high normal blood pressure resources should be focused on those individuals that are in middle age.”

The systems - which check patients’ blood pressure, weight and other health-related measurements daily and send information to their medical team - are one strategy to catch problems early to prevent hospitalizations and help control health spending as the population ages.

The new findings don’t mean so-called telemonitoring will never work, researchers said, but they suggest that the home check-ins might not be useful, or cost-effective, for everyone.

Henrik Svanstrom, M.Sc., of Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues conducted a study to assess whether use of losartan is associated with increased all-cause mortality in heart failure patients compared with candesartan. The study, which included data from a nationwide Danish registry, linked individual-level information on hospital contacts, filled prescriptions, and potential confounders (factors that can influence outcomes). Patients ages 45 years and older with first-time hospitalization for heart failure in 1998-2008 were identified from the registry. New users of losartan and candesartan were selected for inclusion in the study cohort. The final study group included 6,479 patients; 2,082 users of candesartan and 4,397 users of losartan.

During follow-up, there were 2,378 deaths in the study population. Among these, 330 occurred during ongoing candesartan use and 1,212 during ongoing losartan use. The researchers found no significantly increased risk of death associated with use of losartan as compared to candesartan. Also, use of losartan was not significantly associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality compared with candesartan use.

Among patients with a history of hyperlipidemia, those living in countries with low health system performance and high out-of-pocket expenditures were more likely to have elevated total cholesterol levels, according to Elizabeth Magnuson, ScD, of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., and colleagues.

The findings, the researchers reported online in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, “underscore the importance for countries to maintain, improve, or establish effective surveillance of chronic disease risk factors such as cholesterol levels, while also prioritizing population-based efforts aimed at the prevention and management of chronic diseases.”

Magnuson and colleagues looked at data from the international REACH (Reduction of Atherothrombosis for Continued Health) registry. The current analysis included 53,570 outpatients ages 45 and older from 36 countries. All were at risk for atherothrombosis either because of established disease or risk factors.

Compared to the participants in a government-funded study who ingested the least amount of soy protein, the highest level of soy intake correlated with a 5.52 mm Hg reduction in systolic blood pressure (P<0.05), Safiya Richardson, a medical student at Columbia University in New York, reported at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology.

Joanne Foody, MD, associate professor of medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in Boston, said, “Despite the attempts to account for many confounders and variables, I think it is still possible that soy consumption is a surrogate for a healthier lifestyle which could account for the drop in blood pressure.” Foody, who was not involved in the study, suggested that further studies would be required to determine how much soy impacts blood pressure.

???Statin therapy is the cornerstone of pharmacological therapy for the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. All currently available guidelines state that LDL-C levels should be used as the primary target to initiate and titrate lipid-lowering therapy. However, trials investigating the efficacy of statin therapy have shown that the cardiovascular benefits of statins may go beyond their influence on LDL-C levels. Thus, LDL-C may not be the best lipid parameter to predict cardiovascular risk or to quantify the atheroprotective effect of statin therapy,??? according to background information in the article. Several alternative lipid and apolipoprotein parameters have been proposed as alternatives for LDL-C, most prominently apolipoprotein B and non-HDL-C (total cholesterol minus HDL).

S. Matthijs Boekholdt, M.D., Ph.D., of the Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis to assess whether among patients receiving statins, non-HDL-C and apoB were more strongly associated with the risk of future cardiovascular events than LDL-C.

A study of 230 high blood pressure patients found those with big differences in systolic pressure were more likely to die from heart attack, stroke or other causes.

More heart health checks may be needed in those with different readings, says the British Heart Foundation.

Not all medics follow national guidance to measure blood pressure in both arms.

According to Prof. Ehud Grossman of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Sheba Medical Center, many common over-the-counter and prescription medications are underlying causes of hypertension, which is a major risk factor for stroke, heart attack, and aneurisms. The chemical components of the drugs can raise blood pressure or interfere with anti-hypertensive medications, he explains. And while many medications can cause this drug-induced hypertension, both patients and doctors remain dangerously uninformed.

His recent research was published in the American Journal of Medicine.

In a presentation during the 20th European Congress of Psychiatry in Prague, Mayo Clinic psychiatrists will present a systematic literature review of prazosin in the treatment of nightmares. Researchers investigated 12 prazosin studies, four of which were randomized controlled trials.

“The studies showed the drug was well-tolerated and can take effect rapidly, within days to weeks, and some patients reported a return of nightmares when the course of prazosin was stopped,” says Simon Kung, M.D., a Mayo Clinic psychiatrist and principal investigator of the study.

“There’s not much available for treating nightmares in terms of medications, so prazosin is a promising option,” Dr. Kung says. 

African-Americans commonly develop hypertension at a younger age, are less likely to have their blood pressure under control, and disproportionately suffer strokes and fatality when compared with their Caucasian counterparts. Statistics include a 30 percent greater rate of non-fatal stroke, an 80 percent greater rate of fatal stroke, and a staggering 420 percent greater rate of end-stage kidney disease for African-Americans.

But research estimates show that only 51 percent of all patients with hypertension adhere to their medications and that adherence rates are even lower for African-American patients.