Brief introduction about the eHypertension
The eHypertension aims to recruit 500 healthy controls and 2000 essential hypertension patients in southeast China. More than 400 phenotypes will be recorded, including psychosocial characteristics, physical measurements, biochemical parameters, environmental factors and clinical status. Besides, fasting blood, urine and stool samples will be collected for omics profiling, such as genome, metagenome, metabolome and others. For essential hypertension patients, randomized antihypertensive interventions will be carried out and the patients will be followed up for 10 years.
Antihypertensive interventions
For patients willing to receive antihypertensive therapy, they were randomly treated with calcium channel blockers (CCB) or angiotensin Ⅱ receptor blockers (ARB), the two most used first-line antihypertensive agents in China. The patients received 20 mg olmesartan medoxomil (ARB) and 5 mg amlodipine besylate (CCB) daily. After 1 month, the patients are invited by local GPs for the assessment of treatment efficacy. If the average blood pressure cannot be controlled below 90/140 mmHg after three measurements, the treatment should be switched to another antihypertensive for another month. If it still does not work, combined treatment with angiotensin Ⅱ receptor blocker and calcium channel blocker is recommended.
Long-term follow-up
Patients will be followed-up for 10 years to monitor changes in their health status. Every 2 years, follow-up appointments will take place in local medical centers and comprehensive phenotypes together with biological samples will be collected. Healthy control will not be followed-up unless they have developed essential hypertension in the later stage and are willing to join in.