Before I get into the medications, I want to give a brief overview of hypertension.

Just discuss some of the clinical practice pearls that you might see associated with medication therapy

and what guides that selection a little bit.

So first off, complications and risks.

So high blood pressure, the big things are heart attack and stroke.

Also, from a cardiovascular standpoint, it can increase the risk of heart failure as well as aneurysms. Also, blood pressure can impact renal function,

so it can cause worsen chronic kidney disease and can contribute to some vision issues as well.

So obviously it's going to be important to treat high blood pressure.

I wouldn't expect you to, you know, 100% memorize all the goals and that type of thing.

I would say a good starting point is 140 over 90.

With that said, we have gotten more and more aggressive typically. So

130 over 80 is ideal for most. There are a couple exceptions where we might want to go even

lower, like less than 120 for systolic blood pressure in patients with kidney failure or renal disease and

that sort of thing.

So again, that kind of target can, you know, vary a little bit.

Everybody for sure, ideally should be under 140 over 90.

You know, the one exception might be, you know,

end of life, high risk geriatric patients,

where, you know, we might have a little more liberal goal there

of maybe like 150 over 90.

But 140 over 90 is, you know,

you probably want most of your population to be under that.

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