May 28, 2009 — Blood-pressure-lowering drugs should be offered to everyone, regardless of their blood pressure level, as a safeguard against coronary heart disease and stroke, researchers who conducted a meta-analysis of 147 randomized trials (comprising 958,000 people) conclude in the May 19 issue of BMJ [1].
Imagine the avalanche after this!! Drug companies will start making more antihypertensive drugs and pushing us to start prescribing them like vitamins!
Looking back, prescribing drugs in modern medicine has been a dynamic process through the years, especially the past few decades to be exact. For example at one time it was wrong to give patients with congestive cardiac failure, beta-blockers, as the negative inotropic effect will worsen the pump failure. However nowadays, beta-blockers are routinely given for ischemic heart disease patients even though their heart may already be in a state of failure.
Decades ago, many physicians would have raised their eye-brows should they hear of how we routinely prescribe anti-clotting drugs like aspirin to all moderate to high-risk patients with hypertension /diabetes. Today, the more aggressive physicians are starting anti-clotting or anti-platelets even much earlier in even low risk patients. They would even start on 2 or 3 anti-hypertensive drugs straight away to bring the blood pressure down to 130/80 and below. All these in the aim of preventing cardiovascular events namely ischemic heart attacks and stroke.
But starting a normotensive person with antihypertensive medication?? That would be a great paradigm shift in medicine. I doubt it will ever take place but in decades to come when life becomes more complicated and fast, taking antihypertensive drugs would probably be the norm. Allahu’alam.
2 comments:
lovely! soon we'll have MLP promoting healthy lifestyle with antihypertensives.
Oh...well this totally ruins everything I just read in my books yesterday.
I'll have one jar of captopril to go, please.
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