[Abnormal glycemic metabolism in essential hypertension. Role of the an oral glucose tolerance test].

Background And Objective: There is a high prevalence of diabetes in essential hypertensive patients, hence increasing the cardiovascular risk of these subjects. Our aim was to test the importance of a routine assessment of an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) in a sample of recently diagnosed essential hypertensives.

Patients And Method: We studied 270 recently diagnosed untreated hypertensives (56% males). We measured fasting lipids and plasma glucose and insulin at baseline and after OGTT.

Results: 38.5% of the studied subjects had any abnormality of glucose metabolism, glucose intolerance (22.2%) and type 2 diabetes (12.2%) being the most common. An impaired fasting glucose was present in 4.1% of subjects. Patients with intolerance or type 2 diabetes had a worse plasma lipid profile, and those with impaired fasting glucose, a higher HOMA index.

Conclusions: The high incidence of glucidic abnormalities found in hypertensive patients signals a need to perform an OGTT test in them. This can lead to the implementation of strategies aimed at halting vascular impairment in hypertensives with type 2 diabetes and delay the development of type 2 diabetes in patients with glucose intolerance.