LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Hypertension Articles in Primary Care Journals

Medical journals are an important source of continu-ing education of primary care physicians in practice. An increase in the number of specialty journals could decrease the number of articles submitted to primary care journals. Journals may solicit review articles; however, most published articles are selected from the large pool of articles submitted to the journal by the potential author. The editors make the decision as to the type of articles ultimately published. Hypertension is the most common chronic disease seen in primary care practices and primary care phy-sicians are responsible for most of the hypertension care. The Joint National Committee publishes guide-lines for primary care physicians, with the most recent publication in 1997.1–3 Despite these excellent guide-lines, control of hypertension decreased to only 27.4% in 1991 to 1994 compared to the previous 3-year pe-riod according to NHANES III.1 Because effective treatment of hypertension is dependent on knowl-edge, how commonly are hypertension articles and reviews reported in primary care journals? A Medline search using the Ovid search engin