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What is high blood pressure?
Blood pressure is the strength with which our blood pumps around our body. It’s normal for our blood pressure to rise and fall during the day. But, if it stays high most of the time, high blood pressure can harm us. High blood pressure is called hypertension. It can put extra strain on our heart and blood vessels. Over time, this can lead to serious health problems like heart attacks, strokes, kidney damage, and dementia. Most people who have high blood pressure don’t have symptoms and won’t know that they have high blood pressure unless they are tested.
Why is screening not always a good idea?
All screening has the potential to cause harm as well as benefit. It can identify things that would never have caused problems, leading to unnecessary worry and treatment. Screening can sometimes raise false alarms when a test result suggests something is wrong but further tests show there’s no issue, which can be stressful. Some real cases can also be missed, which can give false reassurance and delay diagnosis and treatment. Before starting or changing any screening programme, we need to understand if it works better than not screening, or better than the current approach.
What are we trying to find out?
The UK National Screening Committee wants to find out if screening people for high blood pressure would be better for their health. But first, they need to check if there’s enough good-quality evidence to be worth exploring this idea further. We’re looking at how many studies and what types of studies have looked at the following questions:
- How common is high blood pressure in people with, compared to people without, specific risk factors?
- Does screening people who do not feel unwell, to check if they have hypertension, improve their health?
- Do treatments work well for adults who have hypertension detected through screening?