When Drugs Don’t Help High Blood Pressure
There are lots of drugs out there to treat high blood pressure — old and new, cheap and expensive, available in all sorts of combinations and permutations. But for about 25% of patients, drugs don’t seem to help. That’s a big problem, because lots of people have high blood pressure (aka hypertension), and it’s a key risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.
A scientific statement out this month from the American Heart Association says the problem is likely to grow as the nation becomes older and the rate of obesity rises.
“It’s becoming more difficult to treat and it’s requiring more and more medications to do so,” David A. Calhoun told the New York Times. Calhoun, a cardiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, headed the panel that wrote the guidelines.
Resistant hypertension is different than uncontrolled hypertension. Plenty of people have uncontrolled hypertension, for example, because they don’t stick to their drug regimen. Resistant hypertension is when a patient is following a doctor’s directions and taking as many as three different drugs without getting blood pressure under control.
The AHA statement calls for more study of the phenomenon, but adds a list of reasons why such research is tough. It’s highly complicated to launch studies comparing various three- or four-drug combinations. And patients with resistant hypertension often have multiple health problems, such as diabetes and atherosclerosis, which can make it hard to interpret study results.
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