In children 18 and younger, “the diagnosis of hypertension is missed in the majority of cases,” Dr. Goutham Rao, chairman of family and community medicine at University Hospitals of Cleveland, wrote last month in the journal Pediatrics. “In three-fourths of children with pre-hypertension and hypertension the condition is not detected,” he said in an interview. Among them was a 13-year-old boy in Pittsburgh with a blood pressure of 180 over 100. No note was made in the child’s chart of his very seriously elevated blood pressure, and no follow-up was suggested to determine a cause and prescribe a remedy, Dr. Rao said. A major barrier to diagnosis, he said, “is doctors’ lack of knowledge about how to treat high blood pressure in kids. The more doctors know about treatment, the more likely they are to make a diagnosis.”
Read Dr. Rao's complete article in Pediatrics.