193 - Elevate Your Guideline Knowledge, Not Your BP: The New 2025 Hypertension Guidelines
HelixTalk - Rosalind Franklin University's College of Pharmacy Podcast
Sean P. Kane, PharmD, BCPS
4.9 • 650 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, we review the newly published 2025 ACC/AHA hypertension guidelines.
Key Concepts
- Instead of the Pooled Cohort Equations (PCE) from 2013, the 2025 hypertension guidelines recommend a new risk equation called PREVENT, which incorporates new risk factors and does not include race as part of the risk calculation.
- The guidelines recommend starting two antihypertensive medications for initial therapy in stage II hypertension and one antihypertensive medication for stage I hypertension.
- The guidelines no longer recommend specific first-line therapies for black patients. Instead, all patients without compelling indications should be initiated on a thiazide, ACE inhibitor, ARB, or dihydropyridine calcium channel blocker regardless of race/ethnicity.
- All patients should have a blood pressure goal of < 130/80 mmHg. Some patients may consider a more stringent goal of < 120/80 if they have diabetes or are at a higher risk of future ASCVD events.
References
- Jones DW, Ferdinand KC, Taler SJ, Johnson HM, Shimbo D, Abdalla M, Altieri MM, Bansal N, Bello NA, Bress AP, Carter J, Cohen JB, Collins KJ, Commodore-Mensah Y, Davis LL, Egan B, Khan SS, Lloyd-Jones DM, Melnyk BM, Mistry EA, Ogunniyi MO, Schott SL, Smith SC Jr, Talbot AW, Vongpatanasin W, Watson KE, Whelton PK, Williamson JD. 2025 AHA/ACC/AANP/AAPA/ABC/ACCP/ACPM/AGS/AMA/ASPC/NMA/PCNA/SGIM Guideline for the Prevention, Detection, Evaluation and Management of High Blood Pressure in Adults: A Report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Joint Committee on Clinical Practice Guidelines. Circulation. 2025 Aug 14. doi: 10.1161/CIR.0000000000001356. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 40811497.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Helix Talk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers covering real-life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics, and drug therapy discussions. |
| 0:11.0 | This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosal Franklin University College of Pharmacy. |
| 0:17.0 | This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional |
| 0:22.4 | advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified health care provider. |
| 0:27.2 | And now on to the show. |
| 0:31.2 | Welcome to Helix Talk, episode 193. I'm your co-host, Dr. Kane, and I'm excited to have Dr. |
| 0:37.0 | Shervastava or Dr. S with us here today, |
| 0:39.6 | who is a frequent contributor on Helix Talk. So Dr. S, welcome. |
| 0:43.4 | Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. |
| 0:45.6 | And the title of today's episode is, elevate your guideline knowledge, not your blood pressure, |
| 0:50.2 | the new 2025 hypertension guidelines. So Dr. S, why have you joined us today to talk about this important topic? |
| 0:57.0 | Hypertension is so prevalent. |
| 0:59.2 | Any pharmacists, I would say, working in most practice settings, are coming across people who |
| 1:04.1 | have hypertension, have family members who have hypertension, who knows, maybe even have |
| 1:07.8 | hypertension themselves. |
| 1:08.9 | And so knowing that these new guidelines have come out, |
| 1:11.5 | it's really important to know what are the experts saying. And for the listeners, you know, we had |
| 1:16.4 | 2017 guidelines and then the new 2025 ACCHA guidelines were recently published. So in this episode, |
| 1:24.2 | we're going to review some of the key concepts that kind of came to the forefront for us |
| 1:28.2 | in terms of what was important from those 2025 updates. But of course, there's a lot more than what we |
| 1:33.2 | can cover in today's episode. So in our show notes, again, this is episode 193 at helixtalk.com. |
| 1:39.3 | You can get a link for the full guidelines and take a look for yourself. But we're here to summarize them for you. |
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