Hypertension is one of the two com¬monest diseases usually lumped together under the term "heart disease" but which physicians group under the category of diseases of the heart, blood vessels, and kidneys - the cardiovascular-renal diseases, in medical parlance. As many of you are aware, by far the most frequent causes of death in American adults today are linked to diseases within this category. Indeed, if all other causes of death were, by some magic, wiped out tomorrow, the death rate in our adult population would be de¬creased by less than one-half! There are other conditions that can cause cardiovascular-renal disease, but about 95% of deaths are caused by hypertension, arteriosclerosis, or both. In other words, more than half of all deaths in adults are due to these two diseases.
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