Study finds early drug use may thwart hypertension

Researchers suspect that a blood pressure medication actually could interrupt processes that result in hypertension.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. April 10, 2006.

Washington -- Treating prehypertensive patients with medications to postpone what is generally considered an inexorable march to full-blown hypertension is an idea glimmering on the horizon but not a concept whose time has come.

Physicians do, of course, treat prehypertension but generally by counseling patients to forget the salt shaker and get more exercise.

Now, though, findings from the recent Trial of Preventing Hypertension, or TROPHY study, hint that it just might be possible to treat prehypertension with medications to at least postpone the risk to hearts and kidneys that hypertension poses.

"There are elements of our study that suggest, yes, treatment is useful. But it is a small study and treatment lasted only two years, so we need to explore what longer treatment would do," said lead author Stevo Julius, MD, ScD, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor.

The study was presented March 14 at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting and was published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Hypertension is a major public health problem affecting one in four Americans. The damage it inflicts on the body is well-documented, and the necessary lifestyle changes that could help prevent or at least postpone dangerous elevations in pressure often are difficult for patients to maintain.

Seeking to draw attention to a growing body of scientific literature pointing to harms that begin at much lower pressure levels than was thought, the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Elevation and Treatment of High Blood Pressure included a prehypertension category in its updated 2003 guidelines. The category covers an estimated 59 million people -- specifically, those with a systolic blood pressure of 120 to 139 mm Hg or a diastolic pressure of 80 to 89 mm Hg.