Editorial: Management of Elevated Heart Rate in Essential Hypertension: Pathophysiological Insights and Therapeutic Approach

For several aspects tachycardia may be considered the hidden risk factor. In the general population tachycardia has been associated with increased total Intriguing lines of research suggest that for each species of mammals exists a predetermined number of heart beats in a lifetime, with an inverse semilogarithmic relation between heart rate and life expectancy Nevertheless of this, although clinic resting heart rate (RHR) is one of the cardiovascular parameters more easily measurable, rarely the cardiovascular risk of the general population is also evaluated in relation to the RHR. Several limitations and uncertainties exist, first of all the lack of a common standard of normality of RHR and of a shared cutoff between "safe" RHR and elevated RHR. [1], the concrete and relevant different prognostic value of elevated RHR between the two genders, The evaluation and the clinical approach to elevated RHR in hypertensive subjects appear to be an even more complex problem. According to the latest guidelines provided by the European Society of Hypertension/European Society of Cardiology, it is suggested to the physicians to include the assessment of the RHR between the various clinical and instrumental elements useful to determine the cardiovascular risk of the hypertensive subject [9], but to date the value attributed to the RHR in the various clinical and experimental settings in which it has been evaluated is extremely variable. Suffice to say that the proportion of the patients with high blood pressure and tachycardia varies widely in the various studies addressing this issue. Probably because RHR is influenced by a wide range of factors, first of all low level of physical activity in sedentary subjects