High blood pressure : a risk of insufficiency of the mitral valve

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Published the 19.10.2017 at 15h26

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Keywords :

hypertension artérielleInsuffisance mitral

High blood pressure permanent, known as arterial hypertension (HTA), presents a major risk to a range of cardiovascular diseases and in particular coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, and aneurysms.
The insufficiency of the mitral valve in people with no known history of heart disease is considered a degenerative disease without risk factors accessible to prevention strategy. The elevation of the blood pressure is also considered as a risk factor of various diseases that are associated with insufficiency of the mitral valve. In these conditions, it became necessary to analyze the risk of insufficiency of the mitral valve during a high blood pressure.

A very extensive study for 10 years

A team of british researchers has followed for about 10 years, nearly 5.5 million people without cardiovascular disease or valvular known at the outset. This study, published in PLOS Medicine, shows an association very clearly between high blood pressure and the risk of insufficiency of the mitral valve. However, it is not associated with an increased risk of mitral stenosis.

This relationship is very clear and expresses no threshold of blood pressure below or above which the relationship ceases to exist. The association is only partially explained by diseases that are causes established mitral insufficiency secondary.

This suggests very strongly that high blood pressure has a direct effect and independent of the degeneration of the mitral valve.

That is the meaning of this discovery in practice ?

The results of this study suggest that the mitral insufficiency is not a disease of the inevitable, degenerative, and associated only with aging. It appears, therefore, that its risk of occurrence could be reduced with effective care of the blood pressure.
Other studies have yet to demonstrate the causality of this association and to test the link between lowering blood pressure and reducing the risk of mitral insufficiency.