Prevalence of Renovascular Hypertension in Patients with Grade III or IV Hypertensive Retinopathy

STRATEGY for diagnosing renovascular hypertension has been influenced by an estimate that the disorder has a prevalence of 5 per cent or less in the population with hypertension.1 To apply that estimate to an individual patient with hypertension assumes that the prevalence of renovascular hypertension is the same throughout the spectrum of hypertensive severity. To evaluate whether renovascular hypertension has a higher prevalence in patients with very severe hypertension, we investigated the frequency with which renovascular hypertension was detected in patients with malignant (Grade IV hypertensive retinopathy) and accelerated (Grade III hypertensive retinopathy) hypertension.MethodsPatient SelectionRecords of patients . . .