Treatment of Hypertension Assignment 1

CF is a sixty-year-old African American male who presents as a new patient for initial evaluation and follow-up. He has been diagnosed with hypertension for the last twelve years and Type 2 diabetes for the same period of time. His current blood pressure is 162/90, with a pulse of 76. His body mass index (BMI) is 32. He is currently taking Maxzide 37.5/25 mg every morning. This is the only antihypertensive medication he has taken.

For this question, focus on the treatment of hypertension. Discuss the influences of his age, gender, and ethnicity on hypertensive medications. On the basis of an analysis of those factors, provide one option for improvement of his blood pressure and provide a clear and specific justification for that choice. Be sure to include dosage and scheduling. Include highlights of patient teaching and/or recommendations for any lifestyle changes. Support your decisions with at least one reference to a published clinical guideline and one peer-reviewed publication.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.