HYPERTENSION AND QUALITY-OF-LIFE - THE DISEASE, THE TREATMENT OR A COMBINATION OF BOTH

Patients often fail to recognize essential hypertension as a disease u ntil it is identified as such by a physician. Thus it is commonly beli eved that the side effects of the medication are primarily responsible for their feeling ill, rather than the effects of the disease itself. Our study compares the Quality of Life (QoL) of normotensives and hyp ertensives and inquires into the effects of the disease, as well as th ose of antihypertensive medication. The study compared 368 outpatient male hypertensives with 155 male normotensives, matched for age and le vel of education, using various QoL indicators and other measures at t he beginning of a one-year, controlled clinical trial. The results sho wed that the hypertensives view their life events as more severe and l ess desirable than do the normotensives: they exhibit higher depressio n scores, more semantic memory problems and less satisfactory sex live s; they feel less fit physically, less in control of their lives, more tense and score lower on a hardiness scale in comparison with their n ormotensive counterparts. To assess the influence of previous antihype rtensive treatment, we divided the hypertensives into those who had un dergone previous pharmacological treatment and those not previously tr eated. The results showed that impairment of QoL is related to age, di sease and previous treatment. These findings suggest either that patie nts became committed to this ''sick role'' long before our inquiry, or that hypertension is a disease in which patients report lower levels of QoL in some aspects (compared with those of normotensives) even if not receiving medication.