Korean Life-Style Modification Effects on Blood Pressure

In hypertension, lifestyle modification has been proven to be effective in reducing blood pressure while decreasing the risk of cardiovascular disease. The dietary approaches to stop hypertension(DASH) diet, sodium restriction and exercise has been shown to reduce systolic blood pressure by 8-14mmHg, 2-8mmHg and 4-9mmHg, respectively. The DASH-sodium diet has been shown to have additional systolic blood pressure lowering effect of 7.2mmHg, which is equal to adding one antihypertensive drug. However, as the dietary pattern is different in the Korean population, the investigators cannot implement the data from Western countries directly to the Korean population. For example, the consumption of dairy products is much smaller in the Korean population when compared to the western population. Therefore, the effectiveness of DASH-sodium diet and exercise on blood pressure lowering in the Korean population is not well defined. In this study, the investigators sought to determine the effectiveness of the DASH-salt diet and DASH-salt diet plus exercise on brachial blood pressure lowering. The study will be performed on untreated prehypertension patients and uncontrolled hypertensive patients undergoing anti hypertensive treatment with blood pressure measured between 140-159mmHg/90-99mmHg at the time of enrollment.