Cardiovascular health and target end-organ damage and comorbidities in hypertensive patients from a Spanish primary care urban population

We hypothesized that a poorer cardiovascular health status is related to a higher risk of hypertension-mediated organ-damage (HMOD) or hypertension-related comorbidities (HRC). We assessed the relationship between cardiovascular health metrics (CVHM) and HMOD-HRC in 243 hypertensive patients from primary care center followed for two years. We recorded the baseline CVHM score (Life's Simple 7) plus clinical data, including prevalent and incident HMOD-HRC, hospitalization and mortality. The prevalence of ideal CVHM scores was very low in both men and women. The patients with healthier CVHM scores were younger, and had a lower prevalence of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and chronic kidney disease. We recorded 264 cases of HMOD-HRC (225 at baseline and 39 during followup). Nine patients died and 64 had any-cause hospitalization during follow-up. A lower prevalence of HMOD-HRC and unfavorable outcomes was observed as the number of ideal CVHM increased (P < 0.05). Multivariate logistic regression adjusted for confounders showed a lower CVHM score (0-1) was associated with increased odds of HMOD-HRC (4.04, 95% CI 1.26-12.94; P = 0.019) and composite endpoint (HMOD-HRC, death or all-cause hospitalization) (3.43, 95% CI 1.19-9.92; P = 0.023). Individual components were less predictive than the cumulative CVHM score. Few hypertensive patients in this urban population had ideal CVHM scores. An inverse relationship between scores and outcomes (HMOD-HRC, death or hospitalizations) was observed. Interventions to increase this score may improve prognosis among community -based hypertensive patients. (c) 2022 Sociedad Espa nola de Nefrologia. Published by Elsevier Espa na, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC BY -NC -ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/).