Blood Pressure age 60-80
This graph shows trends in blood pressure in registered patiens aged 60-80 on the date stated.
Why 60-80? Because this is the age group most at risk from disease related to high blood pressure such as heart attacks and strokes.
The pale blue band shows patient with normal BP on no treatment.
The dark blue band shows patients with normal BP on treatment
The pink band shows patient with high BP but on treatment.
The red band shows patients with high BP on no treatment.
The white band shows patients who have not had their BP measured in the practice in the past 3 years.
Trends
Overall all the lines move upwards but roughly in parallel so there is still a group of about 350 people with 'high blood pressure' on no treatment (red band). The graph does not show whether they are mildy abnormal or wildly abnormal although the former is more likely.
Our push to measure BP in healthy, asymptomatic people since 2004 has resulted in a steady decrease in the size of the 'unknown' group (white band) and a steady increase in the size of the 'known and OK' group (pale blue band) - the implication being that most of the unknowns are OK.
The size of the 'OK on treatment' group (dark blue band) is slowly but surely increasing....
Notes on interpretation
The figures present almost the worst possible case. A latest reading of either high systolic BP or high diastolic BP is used to determine success in treatment so a patient with isolated systolic hypertension of 152mmHg is still entered as treatment failure. Patients with true 'white coat' hypertension - found to be normal using ambulatory BP monitoring are still included as treatment failure even though they are not - the search just gets too complex to exclude these at present. On the other hand diabetics are not identified in the search and so are assessed using the higher non-diabetic target. So our actual performance is probably somewhat better than shown...
