Position paper on the 2024 ESH clinical practice guidelines for the management of arterial hypertension in Spain

Abstract

The 2024 European Society of Hypertension clinical practice guidelines for the management of arterial hypertension (ESH Guidelines 2024) have recently been published, a brief document but with a very elaborate infographic that summarizes as much as possible the previous guidelines for the management of arterial hypertension (HTN), aimed at serving as a quick reference tool to make decisions in daily clinical practice. The main objective of this work is to analyze the recommendations and innovations of these guidelines from the perspective of their applicability and taking into account all the scientific societies in the specialty of Family and Community Medicine, Internal Medicine and the Spanish Society of Hypertension (SEHLELHA) in order to achieve more homogeneous and evidence-based care for HTN in Spain. The most important results include the maintenance of the thresholds to define HTN and the therapeutic objectives, as well as the recommendation to initiate pharmacological treatment based on both the blood pressure values and the cardiovascular risk estimated by SCORE2 and the presence of organic damage. New are the introduction of practical tables to estimate the fragility of hypertensive subjects based on their age and autonomy, as well as precise recommendations for monitoring HTN. In summary, the ESH 2024 Guidelines represent a useful, reasoned and concise instrument that can serve as a tool to improve the control of HTN in our environment.