(Slate.com) — A new study is turning decades of medical dogma on its head. A panel of independent experts reports this week that drugs used to treat mild cases of high blood pressure have not been shown to reduce heart attacks, strokes, or overall deaths.
Most of the 68 million patients in the United States with high blood pressure have mild, or Stage 1, hypertension, defined as a systolic (top number) value of 140-159 or a diastolic (bottom number) value of 90-99. The new review suggests that many patients with hypertension are overtreated—they are subjected to the possible harms of drug treatment without any benefit.
The study was conducted by the widely respected Cochrane Collaboration, which provides independent analyses of medical data. The “independent” part is important: The panelists who conducted the analysis don’t take money from drug companies.
Since many doctors and professional societies have been promoting treatment for mild hypertension for decades, the astute reader might wonder why this analysis was conducted only recently. The reasons are complex, but in a nutshell, researchers simply never addressed the question: Does treatment of mild hypertension help or harm patients? Instead, many authorities simply assumed that treatment helped, probably because treatment of more severe hypertension has been shown to be beneficial. In most clinical trials, patients with all degrees of hypertension were simply lumped together.
The Cochrane reviewers extracted data from all prior clinical trials to date that included test subjects treated for mild hypertension. They analyzed the outcomes of drug treatment (compared to no treatment or placebo) for nearly 9,000 patients with mild hypertension. James Wright, coordinating editor of the Cochrane Hypertension Group, told Slate that his group’s analysis doesn’t preclude the possibility that a larger study might find a small degree of benefit that was not apparent from the available data. But the fact that no benefit was detected in the Cochrane analysis means that any benefit is likely to be small—if present at all. And there’s always the possibility that the drugs cause a slight net harm. Some of the drugs are known to cause serious complications, including death.
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When I went for a healthy heart check up after I retired I was quite shocked that BP had risen to over 150 when it had always been very low all my life. I was given a prescription for Statins. When I arrived home I checked for side-effects on the internet and decided not to start taking them. It seems that once started you have to stay on them with other possible side-effects ensuing. Instead I increased exercising by taking up more sport (through retirement of course – I did have more time for this) and now my blood pressure has gone down again to 130 and is stable.
I am not a doctor but if you have high cholesterol it would be better if you tried to do something about it, especially since your blood pressure now is reasonable. My BP is in the mid 130s/mid 70s and very low cholesterol. I am happy with this and my (new) doctor seems reluctant at this stage to prescribe BP medication.
I have friends with low to normal blood pressure and high cholesterol. They say they are not too concerned since their BP is ‘normal’. High cholesterol is not good! It damages the arteries even with normal blood pressure.
If you don’t want to take statins, and I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t either, try everything possible to get your cholesterol, if it is high, down to normal levels and you are on the right track to a long and healthy life.
Statins for high blood pressure? Something is not quite right, statins are not prescribed for that purpose. Instead they are prescribed to control lipids, fats, in the blood.
Last week I asked a question about L-Arginine. How do I find out if there has been an answer? Guess I am technically challenged!
Definitely l-arginine helps bp. However I cannot take it because I have had shingles twice and apparently it could trigger another episode? I do take other supplements that help bp.
Where is the information on L-arginine making one more suseptable to shingles? I had not read that in all my research into L-arginine. I’ve been on a heavy dose of L-arginine for about 8 months doing some good with BP. Had bad shingles about 5-6 years ago. No sign of shingles recurrance. Seems if there is some causative factor it would have surfaced by now. Should I be concerned? Anybody know?
These news are not exactly ‘new’ news and some doctors with a more open mind have been advocating this for some time and warned that aggressive treatment of patients with mild hypertension may be harmful.
What makes this report special is that it comes from highly respected Cochrane Collaboration that, btw, also published a report on the effectiveness and overtreatment as result of screening for breast cancer.