Is it about time to establish economics of hypertension?
Currently, the management of hypertension based on drug and non-drug (surgery, lifestyle improvement) is very important and popular. All these strategies (agents, surgery and lifestyle) inextricably link to economics. The so-called investment, cost, benefit, cost-efficiency relationship and so on, are common terms in modern economics. In the field of clinical medicine, the management of mNCDs, such as CVD, diabetes, and cancer, also needs these keywords. Pharmaceutical companies pursue economic benefits, Phase I/II/III clinical trials of new agents focus on endpoint events of the outcomes and patients’ benefit, and ultimately, the survival of the fittest. Herein, on the National Hypertension Day in 2023, the author proposed that the establishment of “Economics of Hypertension” (Figure 2) is necessary and critical to innovate and optimize the management of hypertension, since BP is related to everyone’s health and life.
Definitely, establishing the “Economics of Hypertension” aims to improve the management of hypertension. Because we are on the journey of Chinese path to modernization, people want to pursue common prosperity and achieve development of high-quality, therefore, we need to pay more attention to health than ever before. “Shared health is shared prosperity, and shared health is a higher level of shared prosperity”. Health is 1, everything else is 0; “Talents are gross domestic production”; “Health is the first capital” [6]. These new concepts and novel economic theories should be widely known and become a consensus for maintaining health. The prevention and control of mNCDs in the new era requires macroeconomic support, while maintaining cardiovascular health requires microeconomic support from the “Economics of Hypertension”.