Mentor: Saruna Ghimire, Ph.D.

Hypertension, commonly known as high blood pressure, is defined by the 2017 American College of Cardiology (ACC) and American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines as a blood pressure reading of 130/80 mm Hg or greater in adults (Carey et al., 2022). Chronic hypertension is a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke, making it a potentially life-threatening condition if left untreated (Anderer & Rekito, 2025). In the United States, approximately 48.1% of the adult population, or roughly 120 million people, suffer from hypertension (Guo et al., 2025). Healthcare spending due to chronic high blood pressure is predicted to rise by $130.4 billion from 2010 to 2030, making hypertension an incredibly costly disease that will prove to be a massive burden on the U.S. economy (Guo et al., 2025). Further, since 2000, hypertension-related mortality has increased and, in 2019, represented more than 500,000 deaths in the United States (Vaughan et al., 2022). This number is expected to rise among adults aged 35 and above, especially in Black populations (Vaughan et al., 2022). Based on a prevalence survey of over 500,000 adults, it was found that eliminating hypertension in women would reduce population mortality by approximately 7.3% and eliminating it in men would reduce population mortality by approximately 3.8% (Carey et al., 2022). Such a reduction in mortality has the potential to alleviate multiple public health concerns surrounding the disease, including the reduction in the population’s quality of life and the high rates of healthcare spending. However, a recent analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) showed that, in general, only 43.7% of the adult population with hypertension had their blood pressure controlled to less than 140/90 mm Hg in 2017 and 2018 (Carey et al., 2022). Uncontrolled hypertension may result from a variety of determinants, including genetic and lifestyle factors, socioeconomic status, treatment noncompliance, underlying health conditions, or a combination of these and other factors. This work aims to closely examine one foundational barrier to hypertension management that influences these factors: access to care.

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