With this edition of the Journal of Human Hypertension (JHH), Professor Gregory Lip is stepping down as Editor-in-Chief. Professor Lip has been a very large part of this journal since 1997, when he was first appointed as an Assistant Editor before rising to the position of Editor-in-Chief. The success of the journal in becoming an important venue for publication of original scientific studies and critical commentaries and reviews related to hypertension and vascular disease is a testament to the expertise and professional dedication of Professor Lip. His oversight and leadership has been a key to the success of the journal and his regular input will be very much missed. Speaking both for the staff of the JHH and the hypertension community, we thank Professor Lip for his long-serving contributions to this journal and wish him the very best.

The new leadership of the JHH will be comprised of Dr David Calhoun as Editor-in-Chief and Professor Michael Stowasser and Dr Sunil Nadar as Associate Editors. Dr Calhoun is at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA. He had been serving previously as the North and South American Associate Editor for the JHH. Dr Calhoun’s research interests include identifying mechanisms of resistant and refractory hypertension, particularly in regards to the roles of hyperaldosternism, high dietary salt and obstructive sleep apnea.

Professor Stowasser will remain as the Asian and Australian Associate Editor, a position he has been filling admirably since 2008. Professor Stowasser is at the Princess Alexandra and Greenslopes Hosptials, University of Queensland School of Medicine, Brisbane, Australia. Professor Stowasser has long-standing research interests in endocrine-related hypertension and cardiovascular disease progression, with a particular focus on potential genetic etiologies of hyperaldosteronism.

The JHH is very fortunate to have as its new European Associate Editor Dr Sunil Nadar. Dr Nadar is at the Heart of England NHS trust and an honorary lecturer with the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. He is an accomplished clinical investigator with particular interests in thrombosis and platelet activation, endothelial and vascular function and clinical and interventional cardiology. Dr Nadar trained with Professor Lip at City Hospital in Birmingham, and so it is only fitting, given Professor Lip’s contributions to the JHH, that his legacy persists both in the consistent success of the journal and in its new leadership.

This is particularly an exciting time to be involved with hypertension, both as a clinician and an investigator. The wide array of antihypertensive medications currently available to prescribing physicians and often at low cost to the patient has enhanced control of hypertension worldwide. It seems that it is now possible to control most patients’ blood pressure with a relatively small number of pills that are generally well tolerated. This represents a major advance from not so long ago when medication choices were more limited, overall less affordable and often less well tolerated.

As far as we have come in terms of better controlling hypertension, overall treatment efficacy will undoubtedly continue to improve with the advent of novel classes of agents and application of device approaches for treating hypertension. Although no new classes of antihypertensive agents seem likely to be immediately available to clinicians, progress continues with a variety of new classes, including early clinical assessments of aldosterone synthase inhibitors, neutral endopeptidase inhibitors and non-steroid mineralocorticoidreceptor antagonists. As development of these and other novel classes of agents progress, even better blood pressure control and, perhaps, potentially unique benefits in terms of preventing hypertension, improving vascular function and better protecting end-organs does not seem far fetched.

Particularly exciting is the early promise of suppressing sympathetic activity with procedures that stimulate carotid sinus baroreceptors or that denervate the kidneys. The magnitude of reduction in clinic blood pressure reported in the first trials of these devices is extraordinary. Confirmation with longer-term, randomized assessments of this degree of antihypertensive benefit will highlight the probably under-appreciated role that sympathetic activation has in causing resistant hypertension. The recent findings from these device trials also indicate that we, as clinicians, do not have an effective method to accurately gauge the role of sympathetic overactivation in causing treatment resistance, nor do we have effective pharmacological agents to suppress sympathetic activity, at least with doses that are well tolerated. Such diagnostic and therapeutic deficiencies are obviously areas ripe for continued scientific research.

The new leadership of the JHH will strive to maintain the journal’s position as an important venue for dissemination of cutting-edge clinical research in hypertension and vascular disease. The JHH has a strong track record of publishing high-quality research from the entire spectrum of hypertension, including pregnancy-related hypertension, children and adolescent hypertension, adult hypertension, and hypertension and vascular disease, in older and even very old cohorts. We look forward to working with investigators to continue publishing original articles with such a broad-based approach. We will also continue to rely on experts worldwide to provide short commentaries and in-depth reviews of important topics in hypertension. It is daunting to imagine building upon the precedent established by the long service of Professor Lip, but given the many, as yet, unmet clinical needs related to preventing, diagnosing and treating hypertension, the importance of meaningful clinical research addressing these needs remains paramount.