Commentary: The effect of a self-management programme on blood pressure levels among people with hypertension: a randomised controlled trial

In 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) released its first-ever report on the devastating global impact of hypertension.The report showed approximately four out of every five people with hypertension are not adequately treated, but if countries can scale up coverage, 76 million deaths could be averted between 2023 and 2050 (WHO, 2023)).Evaluation of interventions for hypertension are therefore essential to provide an evidence base for healthcare providers to help address this 'silent killer' and hence the value of this paper.This paper describes a small-scale randomised control trial undertaken in Thailand to examine the impact of a 4 week app based intervention for people with hypertension.The intervention comprised self-management training, self-monitoring of blood pressure and follow-up via phone calls.The results provided in the paper showed a statistically significant reduction in systolic blood pressure levels in the experimental group, while acknowledging the study limitations and offering recommendations for future studies and with proposals for amendments to the self-management programme.The discussion section overviewed some key recent papers including other studies which had been undertaken on hypertension and self-management interventions and a systematic review, all of which supported the findings that a self-management programme can assist in reducing blood pressure levels and enhancing self-management skills.Interestingly, this study excluded those with diabetes mellitus from participating.The link between diabetes and hypertension is well established (Petrie et al., 2017), and a recent study focused solely on this group and similarly examined the impact of a telehealth intervention on selfmanagement (Ye et al., 2024).The rationale for excluding those with diabetes mellitus in the current study was not explained.The self-management intervention in this paper was based on the fundamental self-management abilities as identified by Lorig and Holman (2003).A questionnaire was developed to evaluate selfmanagement in the domains of medical, role and emotional management.