Hypertension remains one of the most common forms of cardiovascular
diseases affecting and plaguing both developing and developed countries. Hypertension,
despite its ever-increasing prevalence across all age-groups, sex and race is often
associated with potent debilitating complications that constitute huge financial and
social burdens to both its sufferers and the society at large. Thus, hypertension and other
related cardiovascular diseases are considered public menace. Effective management of
hypertension requires a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, based on the
identification of patients at highest cardiovascular risk and the use of multifactorial
interventions, targeting not only the high blood pressure but all modifiable
cardiovascular risk factors. Despite, remarkable and landmark progress and success
recorded with the use of conventional pharmacotherapies in the management of
hypertension and its complications, therapeutic failures still remain a major clinical
concern. Thus, the current chapter defines, highlights and discusses the epidemiology,
classification, aetiopathophysiology and risk factors, and complications of hypertension,
conventional treatment strategies and alternative therapies (particularly with herbal
therapies) employed in the local management of this disease. In addition, an in-depth
insight into the recent development in the therapeutic/clinical use of herbal therapies in
the local management of hypertension with the view of providing evidence-based preclinical
and clinical data that are geared towards promoting the therapeutic use of these
alternatives as alternative/adjuvant therapy in the effective management of
hypertension.
Keywords: Arterial hypertension, aetiopathophysiology, classification, diagnosis
and monitoring, preclinical and clinical data, drug and non-drug therapies, herbal
remedies.
