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AIM OF THE STUDY: To identify the sociodemographic and clinical profile of hypertensive patients who are not compliant with their antihypertensive treatment. METHODS: each cardiologist described his or her next 4 hypertensive patients from a clinical standpoint and gave them a self-administered compliance questionnaire developed by the French Committee to Fight Hypertension, which they returned directly to the analysis center using a postage-paid reply envelope. RESULTS: 1965 patients 63.9 +/- 12.1 years old, 55.3% of whom were male, were included in the study. According to the specific questionnaire, compliance is definitely satisfactory in 35.9% of patients, is probably satisfactory in 28.3%, is probably poor in 19.4% and is definitely poor in 16.4%. Poor compliance is more frequent among men (38.1 vs. 33.4%; p < 0.05), overweight or obese patients (35.8 and 43.0% vs. 30.0%; p < 0.001), diabetics (46.7 vs. 32.3%; p < 0.0001), dyslipidemic patients (39.3 vs. 31.8%; p < 0.001), smokers (50.2 vs. 33.8%; p < 0.0001), those whose father died of cardiovascular causes before 55 years of age (51.6 vs. 34.1%; p < 0.0001) or those with a previous history of CV events (40.6 vs. 32.8%; p < 0.001). The rate of poor compliance increases with the number of risk factors: 27.3% with no risk factor other than high BP, 32.2% with one, 37.2 with 2 and 51.5% with 3 or more (p < 0.0001). Multifactorial analyses confirm the independent effect of obesity, diabetes, smoking, and father's CV death before age 55 on patient compliance. CONCLUSION: patients with the highest CV risk are those who are the least compliant with their antihypertensive treatment. These results raise the question of the appropriateness of the prevention information given to the most at-risk patients.