Essential Hypertension and Its Causes

Book excerpt: Essential hypertension (EH) is the most common type of high blood pressure and is responsible for much death and serious illness, which has been the reason for the huge research effort to determine its causes. However, countless scientific articles still keep proclaiming that "the causese of essential hypertension remain unknown." In view of the number of publications that descend on the hypertension specialist like a waterfall, such proclamations seem to overlook the considerable amount of knowledge that we already have about the etiology of EH. The problem may be a lack of synthesis rather than a lack of information. This book brings together some of this knowledge into a coherent and clinically relevant account about the pathogenesis of EH. With an extremely broad reach, this book aims to give a balanced view of the causes of EH, its neural, genetic, and environmental causes.