In the past decade, there has been an increasing awareness of hypertension as it affects both children and teenagers. It is of particular note that essential or primary hypertension, once considered rare in the young, is being diagnosed with increasing frequency, particularly in adolescence.
As a result of this new awareness, there has been a recent proliferation in the number of reports in the pediatric literature that are related to systemic hypertension. In addition, three symposia in the last two years have been devoted to juvenile hypertension.1.2 The most recent of these, held in October 1977, was cosponsored by the Medical College of Pennsylvania and the Medical Horizons program of the Ciba Pharmaceutical Co. This article is a synthesis of the 22 papers presented in Philadelphia and it attempts to summarize some of the current thinking relative to this new area.
In his overview of the problem, Dr Sidney