[Incidence of hypertension in elderly patients admitted at an internal medicine department]

Abstract

Objectives: To know the arterial hypertension prevalence and isolated systolic hypertension in elderly patients intaked on internal medicine department.

Material and methods: A cross-sectional study of elderly hypertensive patients intaked between 1 to January 2002 to 31 December 2002 in a Internal Medicine Service of the Hospital Clinico Universitario de Santiago de Compostela. The recorded variables were: sex, age, number of days in hospital, hospital exitus, cardiovascular risk factors, number of blood pressure, glucose, cholesterolemia, cardiovascular disease and treatments. It was used descriptive statistic rates of quantitative and qualitative variables, Mann-Withney-Wilcoxon and logistic regression.

Results: The study included 770 patients. The arterial hypertension (HTA) prevalence was 37% and the isolated systolic hypertension (ISH) prevalence were 25.9%. The ISH prevalence was greater in the patients with bad control of blood pressures (67.5 vs. 8.9%), p < 0.01. The 78% of patients with hypertension showed one or more risk cardiovascular factor and the 60.9% of these patients showed one or more cardiovascular disease. We found in patients with hypertension bigger prevalence of mellitus diabetes (66.7 vs. 58.8%), hypercholesterolemia (15.8 vs. 5.5%) and cardiac disease (21.7 vs. 13.0%) than in patients with HAS. It was ran farmacologic treatment in the 49.8% of the patients with high blood pressure and in the 61.8% of the patients with isolated systolic hypertension. The loop diuretics (41.2 vs. 30.2%) and ECAI (17.6 vs. 9.5%) were more used in isolated systolic hypertension.

Conclusions: The hypertension and isolated systolic hypertension prevalences are small in the people studied. The prevalence of heart disease is bigger in patients with high blood pressure, and also it is the disease that caused more deaths in hypertensive patients. The pharmacological treatment used in hypertensive patients is not the most guarantied by the actually evidence.