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Hypertension: From Board Denial to Court Reversal

The two-step reality of a hypertension appeal: what the Board does with these issues, and — when veterans appeal a denial to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims — the arguments that get Board denials set aside.

What this is computed from: 30,584 decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, identified inside a 39,330-document public court-decision corpus and summarized by machine analysis. Every docket number shown below was verified to appear in the court's published decision text in that corpus (112 verified; 0 candidate examples were dropped for failing verification). Selection effect: only Board decisions a veteran chose to appeal reach the Court — most Board denials are never appealed, so these rates describe appealed cases, not all denials. Data build: 2026-08-16.

Step 1 — Hypertension at the Board

From our issue-level parse of 18,313 public Board decisions (dated 2026-01-02 to 2026-03-02; corpus ingest in progress):

Issues decided
1,155
Granted
23.4%
Denied
30.8%
Remanded
35.0%

Full Board-level tables: outcome rates by condition · judge statistics.

Step 2 — appealed denials at the Court

CAVC cases analyzed involving hypertension
2,648
Board decision disturbed
51.0% (1,351)

Arguments that won — verified dockets

CAVC docket 23-1992 · verified · denial type: credibility

Board failed to address veteran's lay reports of in-service symptoms as potentially supporting a later diagnosis of sleep apnea

CAVC docket 16-0646 · verified · denial type: no nexus

The Board failed to consider service connection under Persian Gulf War presumptions and the duty to assist required a medical nexus opinion for that theory.

CAVC docket 24-7795 · verified · denial type: unclassified

Board erred by failing to contact appellant for clarification of an unclear NOD regarding accrued benefits

CAVC docket 08-0488 · verified · denial type: duty to assist

Board failed to address the presumption of soundness and provided inadequate reasons or bases for finding further efforts to obtain SMRs would be futile.

Argument summaries are machine-extracted from the cited public court decisions and lightly compressed; read the full decision by searching the docket number at CourtListener or the Court's own public search. A cited argument working in one record does not guarantee it fits another.

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