Essential Hypertension

To the Editor:— The report of the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry prepared by Goldblatt, Kahn and Lewis inThe Journal, August 8, is an unusually complete survey of the hypertension problem but ignores the weight of recent evidence for the view that essential hypertension in man is fundamentally different from any of the human or experimental types of hypertension which from their outset are associated with organic renal lesions or with organic obstruction to flow in the renal artery or the abdominal aorta proximal to a renal artery. It mentions but does not sufficiently emphasize that essential hypertension in man is often unstable, present only under stress, and may disappear for months or years under dietetic, psychotherapeutic or mild sedative management. It ignores the probability that certain cases of human hypertension have adrenal cortex hyperplasia and overactivity as the fundamental defect, and that desoxycorticosterone causes a nonrenal hypertension similar