Sunday, December 07, 2008

Drug combo for hypertension superior?

From the New York Times article:
The trial compared two pills, each containing two drugs used to lower blood pressure. Patients taking pills that combined an ACE inhibitor with a calcium-channel blocker suffered 20 percent fewer heart attacks, strokes, heart procedures and deaths than those taking an ACE inhibitor with a diuretic, the investigators found.

The study was funded by Novartis, which makes both of the two-in-one pill treatments evaluated, and published in Thursday’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
...
Dr. Aram Chobanian, a professor of medicine and pharmacology at Boston University School of Medicine and author of the editorial, said he had questions about whether the diuretic was used appropriately in this trial, adding that a single trial is “not enough to recommend that everyone be on a calcium-channel blocker and an ACE inhibitor.”
Click here to access the NYT article.

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