Uric acid in hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

Cardiovascular disease, and particularly coronary artery disease, remains the leading cause of mortality worldwide, despite recent substantial declines. Hypertension, long recognized as a risk factor for both stroke and myocardial infarction, is an important target for preventive intervention. However, effective hypotensive therapy produces incomplete cardioprotection, and most events that would have occurred in the natural state continue to occur among controlled hypertensive patients. Further progress in reducing the burden of cardiac disease will depend on early identification of risk in successfully treated hypertensive subjects and the development of preventive interventions that go beyond simple reduction of blood pressure. Recently, elevation of uric acid has been found to be associated with subsequent morbidity and mortality in the general population among patients with congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. A prospective study in a large cohort of well controlled hypertensive subjects has revealed a strong, specific, stepwise, independent association of increasing serum uric acid and cardiac morbidity and mortality. Unanswered, however, is the question of whether uric acid is simply an associated phenomenon, or actually contributes to the occurrence of cardiac events.