This issue of the European Journal of Internal Medicine includes a paper by Coca and collaborators [1] which focuses on a problem of crucial importance for public health. That is, the persistent position of hypertension as the first cause of death and burden of disease, largely because of the limited control of blood pressure (BP) values in the general hypertensive population worldwide [2,3]. The paper emphasizes that the responsible factors are not the unavailability of effective antihypertensive agents, but rather the predominance, at the clinical practice level, of a low adherence to the antihypertensive treatment as well as of a high therapeutic inertia, i.e., failure to up titrate treatment despite the absence of BP control.
