Marian Sninčák
Despite major efforts to diagnose and treat hypertension, this condition remains worldwide a leading cause of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality and goal blood pressure levels are seldom achieved. It is therefore highly desirable to improve this unsatisfactory delivery of care. In the field of hypertension an increasing number of clinical trials allow the formulation of guidelines to support a more effective strategy. Multifaceted interventions are required to implement guidelines successfully, going from the dissemination of recommendations to educational programmes at the site of clinical practice. This requires the participation of all professionals involved in health care, from governemental level to the individual physician. This paper is a current contribution to the above direction. It shortly deals with some modern pieces of knowledge about arterial hypertension in general, more closely describes definitions and classification of hypertension in accordance with the 2003 European guidelines for the management of arterial hypertension, diagnostic evaluation of blood pressure measurement (office or clinic, ambulatory and home blood pressure); also prognosis of risk factors influence, target organ damage, diabetes mellitus and of associated clinical conditions, problems of second opinion board are also stated, mentioned in the _article.