EFFECT OF SYMPATHECTOMY ON BLOOD PRESSURE IN HYPERTENSION

Abstract

The difficulty of assessing the effectiveness of various forms of treatment for essential hypertension is due to several causes, of which the most important are the necessity for following each patient over a period of many years, the variability of the course of the disease in different patients and the lack of adequate statistics concerning the natural history of the disease in a series of patients large enough to include all possible variations in duration and severity. In addition to these fundamental sources of difficulty, the task of carrying out an accurate follow-up study is further complicated by the large number of clinical manifestations of the disease which must be taken into account and the absence of completely satisfactory methods for measuring the severity of the damage done to each of the organs affected. The net result of all these difficulties is reflected in the fact that various authors employ