89 Incremental benefits and harms of the 2017 american college of cardiology/american heart association high blood pressure guideline

Abstract

The recent recommendations from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) to lower the thresholds for defining hypertension follows a general pattern across medical specialties, whereby disease definitions are more frequently widened than narrowed. Such widened definitions usually label people as unwell, even if they are at low risk of a disease, and thus have the potential to cause harm.

We aimed to assess the incremental benefits and harms of the definition used by the ACC/AHA guideline as compared to that used by the Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (JNC7) using the checklist.