2020 International Society of Hypertension global hypertension practice guidelines - lifestyle modification. Reply

Abstract

The 2020 ISH Global Hypertension Practice Guidelines [1] include a detailed list of lifestyle modifications with varying levels of evidence for the reduction of blood pressure and cardiovascular risk. We listed some novel and inexpensive approaches, such as Transcendental Meditation, to purposefully broaden interventions that could be employed in low and high resource settings. We thank Drs Schneider, Salerno and Brook for their noteworthy correspondence emphasizing the importance of this inclusion as a useful intervention to lower cardiovascular risk [2]. The authors correctly highlight that we only cited one systematic review to support this intervention, and that there is a broader range of evidence that require citation. We not only appreciate this notion but also wish to reiterate our statement in the guidelines that the Guidelines Committee did not perform a detailed systematic literature review for the purpose of writing the guidelines, but mostly extracted evidence from recently published guidelines. This was done with the purpose to produce short and practical guidelines