Hospital admissions for dangerously high blood pressure, also known as hypertensive crises, in the U.S. have significantly increased between 2002 to 2014.
A study evaluating a database called the National Inpatient Sample showed that 0.17% of hospital admissions for men in 2002 were for hypertensive crises, which has increased to 0.39% in 2014. The rates for women went up to 0.34% in 2014 from 0.16% in 2002.
"Although more people have been able to manage their blood pressure over the last few years, we're not seeing this improvement translate into fewer hospitalizations for hypertensive crisis," the study's first author Dr. Joseph Ebinger told U.S. News & World Report. Ebinger is a clinical cardiologist and director of clinical analytics at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
During the study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, over 918,000 hospitalizations related to hypertensive crisis nationwide have been recorded, U.S. News & World Report said. There were also nearly 4,400 in-hospital deaths for dangerously high blood pressure during the study period.
"We need more research to understand why this is happening and how clinicians can help patients stay out of the hospital," Ebinger told U.S. News & World Report.
He considers access to health care and affordability of medication to be two factors for the rising hospitalization rates.
