Dr Abdulrazak Abyad  Chief Editor

This is the seventh issue of the Middle East Journal of Family Medicine, which is telling the success story of the journal. The journal is widely read by family physicians and other physicians in the area and is being utilised as an educational tool in a number of different settings. The journal is growing in the number of readers, number of papers and its breadth of content . A career section is being developed and new look for the website has been created by the production team which is a great effort on their part. We are looking forward to serving the movement of family medicine in the Middle-East in the coming year. The number of family medicine programs is still well below the needs of the community and there are a number of efforts by a number of programs to increase the number and the capacity of various programs.

The discipline of family medicine and its leaders have served as agents of change in the developed countries. In the Middle-East we need to take the leadership position in fundamentally altering and improving the health care system of the region.

This issue of the journal has a number of research papers, review papers and some news as well as the regular columns.

An important topic from Turkey that is addressed in this issue is The Evaluation of Patients with Hypertension in the Light of the JNC 7 Report. In this paper the authors evaluated the patients with hypertension according to the JNC 7 Report, and assessed their use of combination therapy and adherence to individualized therapy. Patients were recruited from three different centers of Turkey. A questionnaire that comprise 30 questions was administered to each patient. A total of 153 patients were included in the study. The blood pressure control rate of the study group was 58.2% according to blood pressure < 140/90. There was no difference in the control rates among the patients using single-drug and combined drug therapy (p>0.05). The patients who had regular BP measurements had a better control rate (p<0.05). The results of this study showed that there are still measures to be taken for achieving better individualized therapy, and physicians' judgement on the patients' therapy should be made considering the patient-centered care to achieve better results with individualized therapy.