ABSTRACT
The principles presented elsewhere in this book provide fresh insight into epidemiological studies and clinical trials. The principles provide an explanation as to why diastolic pressure is generally an unsatisfactory index of the hypertensive state and why systolic pressure is more useful. Indeed, this was a dominant theme in previous editions, and anticipated the present swing from diastolic to systolic pressure which followed the mass of evidence accumulating from Framingham (Kannel et al., 1971; Kannel et al., 1981), followed by the MRFIT (Rutan et al., 1986; Domanski et al., 2002) and other epidemiological studies and clinical trials (He and Whelton, 1999; Staessen et al., 2000b; Staessen et al., 2010).
