There is a new European “plan” to improve healthcare for people with hypertension, one of the main risk factors for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, such as heart attack and stroke.
The MASTER plan was developed by the European Society of Hypertension as part of the 2024 Guidelines. One of the main authors of the document is Jorge Polónia, a researcher at CINTESIS@RISE, professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP) and European Specialist in this area.
The new plan, published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, aims to increase patient adherence to treatment and fight “medical inertia” when it comes to prescribing medication.
“The diagnosis and control of hypertension must improve. We must increase adherence to treatment, promote patient literacy and make prescribing easier,” urges Jorge Polónia.
As he points out, “hypertension is the main modifiable risk factor for the main causes of death and morbidity worldwide. Despite the quality of the tools available to control it, the percentage of controlled patients is still less than 40%.”
By outlining the most recent guidelines and advances in a “summarized” and “eminently practical” way, this plan promises to “facilitate a patient-centered approach” and “strengthen patient-health professional interaction”.
According to Jorge Polónia, the approach to hypertension in clinical practice must be “individualized”, with special attention to the elderly over 80 years of age. In these cases, he explains, it is essential to “individualize the strategy based on factors such as autonomy, frailty, dependence and cognitive status”.
Another highlight of this MASTER plan is the role given to “new interactive technologies for recording and assessing diagnosis and response to therapy”, as well as patient self-assessment, something that will require a major commitment to increasing the population’s health literacy.
The aim is also to simplify prescriptions, promote access to prevention and treatment strategies and involve the various health professionals (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, nutritionists, among others) in patient follow-up.
In addition to being a researcher at CINTESIS@RISE and a full professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, Jorge Polónia is a specialist and senior consultant in Hypertension at the Hypertension Unit of the Pedro Hispano Hospital in Matosinhos, and a European specialist in Clinical Hypertension, having also co-authored the 2013, 2018 and 2023 Guidelines of the European Society of Hypertension.