---
type: source
title: "Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Control of Cardiometabolic Risk Factors Among Adults With Hypertension in the United States, 1999–2023"
author: "JACC study authors (multiple)"
url: https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2025.09.1607
date: 2025-10-01
domain: health
secondary_domains: []
format: journal-article
status: processed
priority: high
tags: [hypertension, treatment-adherence, control-rates, cardiometabolic, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, United-States, SDOH, behavioral-health, JACC]
---

## Content

**JACC longitudinal study** tracking prevalence, treatment, and CONTROL of hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia in US adults from 1999–2023.

**Key findings:**

**Hypertension:**
- Affects **1 in 2 US adults** under 2017 ACC/AHA criteria
- Prevalence: **23.4%** ages 18–39, **52.5%** ages 40–59, **71.6%** ages 60+
- **Little change in prevalence between 2009 and 2023** despite decades of awareness campaigns
- Among treated patients: only **23.4%** (95% CI: 21.5%-25.2%) achieved BP control in 2021–2023 by updated criteria

**Cardiometabolic triple (hypertension + diabetes + hyperlipidemia):**
- "Treatment and control of these conditions improved during the 2000s, but progress has **plateaued in subsequent years**"
- "The proportion of individuals with hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia achieving control of all 3 conditions **did not exceed 30%** at any point during the study period"

**Implication:**
Despite the availability of effective generic medications for all three conditions (antihypertensives since 1980s, statins since late 1990s/generics, metformin/sulfonylureas for diabetes), the US healthcare system consistently fails to achieve BP, lipid, and glycemic control simultaneously in the most at-risk patients.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is the companion to the JACC CVD mortality trends archive. While the mortality archive shows WHAT happened (hypertension mortality doubled), this archive explains WHY: treatment and control rates have stagnated at very low levels despite effective, affordable drugs. Only 23.4% of treated hypertensives achieve BP control. This is the clinical face of Belief 2's "80-90% non-clinical" thesis — drugs are prescribed, but the non-clinical factors (medication adherence, food environment, lifestyle, social stress, healthcare access and continuity) overwhelm the pharmacological intervention.

**What surprised me:** The 23.4% control rate is shockingly low. I had assumed statin success and antihypertensive effectiveness would translate to better population-level control. The fact that we've had affordable antihypertensives for 30-40 years and only 23.4% of treated patients achieve control suggests this is a deeply structural problem, not a drug availability problem.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Evidence that control rates are improving meaningfully post-2020 with telehealth expansion, remote BP monitoring, and care management programs. The data through 2023 shows stagnation, not improvement.

**KB connections:**
- [[medical care explains only 10-20 percent of health outcomes because behavioral social and genetic factors dominate as four independent methodologies confirm]] — this is the clinical-trial-level evidence for the 80-90% claim: 76.6% treatment failure despite effective drugs
- [[SDOH interventions show strong ROI but adoption stalls because Z-code documentation remains below 3 percent and no operational infrastructure connects screening to action]] — the SDOH screening/action gap explains why these patients aren't being treated at the SDOH level
- social isolation costs Medicare 7 billion annually and carries mortality risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day — social isolation → adherence failure → treatment non-control
- Big Food companies engineer addictive products by hacking evolutionary reward pathways — food environment → persistent hypertension despite medication

**Extraction hints:**
- "Only 23.4% of treated US hypertensives achieved blood pressure control in 2021-2023, and the proportion simultaneously controlling hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia never exceeded 30% between 1999-2023, demonstrating that pharmacological availability is not the binding constraint in cardiometabolic disease management"
- This claim should be paired with the hypertension mortality doubling claim — cause (treatment failure) and effect (doubled mortality) are in two separate archives

**Context:** JACC study published October 2025, using NHANES longitudinal survey data. NHANES is the gold standard for US health surveillance — nationally representative, continuous since 1999. The 2021-2023 data is the most recent available.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[medical care explains only 10-20 percent of health outcomes because behavioral social and genetic factors dominate as four independent methodologies confirm]]
WHY ARCHIVED: Provides the clinical-operational evidence for Belief 2 — drugs that work are not achieving outcomes at population level. The 23.4% control rate is the single most striking number for the "medicine fails despite availability" argument.
EXTRACTION HINT: Extract as a claim about cardiometabolic risk factor control failure, explicitly framing the 23.4% control rate as evidence that behavioral/SDOH barriers overwhelm pharmacological availability. Extract alongside the hypertension mortality doubling claim (queue/2026-03-30-jacc-cvd-mortality-trends-1999-2023.md) — they form a cause/effect pair.
