The recent recommendations from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) to lower the thresholds for defining hypertension and for treating higher-risk patients have been controversial. Changing the diagnostic and treatment thresholds for hypertension could put people at risk in three ways.

Here, Paul Glasziou and colleagues discuss the incremental benefits and harms and net benefits and harms of reclassifying patients as hypertensive instead of pre-hypertensive.