Hypertension in perspective.

Decisions about the management of hypertensive patients should not be based on the level of blood pressure alone, but also on the presence of other risk factors, target organ damage and cardiovascular and renal disease. The results of echocardiography and carotid ultrasonography aids in the stratification of absolute cardiovascular risk as recently advocated by the guidelines of the European Society of Hypertension 2003. Therefore, the detection of target organ damage by ultrasound techniques allows an accurate identification of high-risk patients. Cardiovascular risk stratification only based on a simple routine work-up can often underestimate overall risk, thus leading to a potentially inadequate therapeutic management especially of low-medium risk patients.