Question 1: What will happen if I just do nothing, and wait and see?
To answer this question, the information they have gathered about the expected course of the disease is important. This includes information on the consequences associated with a particular disease or . Doctors call this the . To have an idea of what consequences a disease can have and how frequent they are, information taken from good-quality studies is needed.
Carl and Peter
Hypertension is a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases like strokes or heart attacks. The risk of having a can be estimated:
- Carl has a 4% risk of having a within the next ten years if his blood pressure stays the same. In other words, 4 out of every 100 men like Carl will have a . Or, seen from a different angle: 96 out of every 100 men whose health is similar to Carl's will not have a , even if they do not have any treatment.
- Peter has a 23% risk of having a within the next ten years because his blood pressure is much higher and he has other risk factors too. Out of every 100 men like Peter, 23 will have a and 77 will not, assuming they continue to smoke and don't make any other changes affecting their individual risks.
Knowing your own might then be enough to base a decision on: You may decide not to have treatment because the condition doesn't worry you much – or you may decide to have treatment because you want to feel safer and do something about it.