Original article
Health status and hypertension: A population-based study,☆☆

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Abstract

We describe the relation between self-reported hypertension and measures of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in a community-dwelling population. In a cross-sectional study, 1430 randomly selected adults, aged 45 to 89 years, were interviewed to obtain a medical history and health status measures, including the SF-36 questionnaire, the Quality of Well Being (QWB) index, and time trade-off (TTO) assessments. A total of 519 participants reported being affected by hypertension (HTN group). The HTN group, compared to the No HTN group, had significantly lower age-adjusted health status scores measured by the General Health (GH) scale of the SF-36 and by TTO, with differences between groups for each measure comprising approximately 5% of the total scale. HTNs also had a significant decline in general health status measures associated with increasing numbers of antihypertensive medications but not with specific classes of medications. We conclude that hypertension and hypertension drug therapy are associated with clinically meaningful decreases in reported health status.

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    This paper was presented in part at the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Society of General Internal Medicine, Arlington, Virginia, April 1993, and at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, October 1993.

    ☆☆

    This project is supported by Grant No. HS 06491 from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, and National Eye Institute Grant 10U06594.

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