Overview
- The Journal of the American Heart Association analysis, published Wednesday, estimated 22.8 million U.S. adults meet the 2025 AHA/ACC criteria for blood-pressure–lowering medication.
- Researchers found 9.7 million of those eligible, about 43 percent, were not receiving antihypertensive drugs at the time of the NHANES 2009–2018 surveys.
- Among eligible adults, medication use was associated with a 23 percent lower all-cause mortality and a 50 percent lower cardiovascular mortality over follow-up compared with no treatment.
- When the team modeled full treatment of the untreated eligible group they projected roughly 200,000 all-cause deaths and 162,000 cardiovascular deaths could be prevented over 10 years.
- Authors and guideline leaders stress lifestyle change and individualized risk assessment using the AHA PREVENT equations, and they caution that single-visit blood-pressure measures and nonrandomized treatment limit causal certainty and the precision of the estimates.