Synopsis of the Report of the Second Task Force on Blood Pressure Control in Children.

A RTERIAL hypertension has a relatively low / \ prevalence in children compared with adults. A. \ . There are, nonetheless, a small number of children for whom the problem is clinically significant, and for their physicians guidelines on detection, evaluation, and treatment are of substantial importance. Moreover, since the essential hypertensive adults of tomorrow will emerge in large part from the normotensive, seemingly healthy children of today, it is important from a preventive medicine standpoint to begin thinking of hypertension as a risk factor in the pediatric age group, even before clinical manifestations of the disease become apparent. To meet these needs, Pediatrics recently published the "Report of the Second Task Force on Blood Pressure Control in Children — 1987."' Since this journal is read primarily by pediatricians, awareness of this task force report and familiarity with its contents are likely to be low within the community of hypertension researchers and adult hypertension practitioners who ordinarily do not subscribe to Pediatrics. Therefore, we have prepared this synopsis to call attention to the existence of this report and to highlight some of the important points emphasized by the task force. This brief synopsis is not intended to take the place of the full report and should not be viewed as a comprehensive presentation of state-ofthe-art approaches to the detection, evaluation, and treatment of hypertension in children. Rather, it is hoped that through this synopsis the reader will become aware of the report, and should more information be desired, consult the full task force report.