Background: Hypertension occurs in up to 75% of hospitalized patients. However, less than 1% have “hypertensive emergency,” defined as severely elevated blood pressure (BP) with end-organ injury. Current guidelines support emergent treatment of hypertensive emergency but recommend against immediate reduction of severely elevated BP in patients without end-organ injury (i.e., asymptomatic hypertension). Recent literature suggests […]

Case Presentation: An 86-year-old woman with a history of hypertension on oral medications and chronic systolic heart failure presented to the hospital with chest pain and dyspnea. She was noted to be acutely hypertensive, tachypneic and hypoxemic. Physical exam revealed diffuse crackles, jugular venous distention and lower extremity pitting edema. EKG was consistent with an […]