Hypertension - Your Questions Answered
Authors: Ian B Wilkinson, W Stephen Waring and John R Cockcroft
The timely diagnosis and successful treatment of hypertension is quite possibly one of the most important issues in primary care, hypertension being a risk factor for so many major and chronic diseases. As with a number of other conditions and as a result of clinical trials and research, the goalposts have been moved over the last few years so that we are diagnosing hypertension more readily and treating it more aggressively. It is not uncommon as a consequence, to have patients taking three and sometimes more drugs in order to bring their blood pressure down to target.
Having already reviewed the book on STROKE in the same series, I was eager to see whether the same easy to read format was a feature of this book and was not disappointed. All too often, discussions about such topics can be tedious and difficult to read with multiple indecipherable graphs and complex statistics. In the YQA format this is not allowed to happen because the medical professional are not the only target audience - a particular useful feature of the book is the succinct answers to common patient questions.
The book begins with a relatively painless section on the classification, epidemiology and consequences of hypertension and is logically followed by assessment, lifestyle intervention and treatment. Hypertension in diabetics and in the elderly receives special mention, as a result no doubt, of the sea change in attitudes towards management. A list of useful addresses, web sites, references and further reading close the book. At no time does the reader feel overwhelmed because the information is all in "bite-sized chunks."
For a comprehensive yet readable review of hypertension as it pertains particularly to primary care, this book is hard to beat.
| Publisher: | Churchill Livingstone
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| ISBN: 0-4430-7255-8
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| Reviewer: | Dr Jeremy M Sager
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