High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is a common health issue. It means that your blood is pushing too hard against the walls of your arteries.
This condition can lead to serious health problems like heart disease and stroke.
Common Treatments for High Blood Pressure
To treat high blood pressure, doctors often prescribe medications. Currently, there are five different types of medicines they can choose from.
These include thiazide diuretics, ACE inhibitors, angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs), and two types of calcium channel blockers.
But here’s the problem: doctors aren’t sure which medicine works best for high blood pressure. So, they usually rely on their judgement or experience to choose a medicine.
The Study at Columbia University
To solve this problem, a team of researchers at Columbia University did a study. They looked at the health records of almost 5 million people who had started taking high blood pressure medicine.
The team found that almost half of the people started their treatment with ACE inhibitors. Only 17% of people started with thiazide diuretics.
The Findings: Thiazide Diuretics are Better
Here’s the surprising part: people who started their treatment with thiazide diuretics had fewer heart problems.
They had 15% fewer heart attacks, heart failure cases, and strokes compared to people who took ACE inhibitors first.
Not only that, but people who took ACE inhibitors first experienced more side effects. They had higher rates of 19 different side effects compared to those who started with thiazide diuretics.
The team estimated that if all the people who started with ACE inhibitors had instead started with thiazide diuretics, about 3,100 heart disease events could have been avoided.
Conclusion: A Need for Updated Guidelines
The results of the study suggest that thiazide diuretics should be the first choice of treatment for high blood pressure. However, more studies are needed to confirm this.
This study helps us understand that choosing the right high blood pressure medicine matters. It could mean fewer heart problems and fewer side effects for millions of people.
This important study was shared in The Lancet journal by George Hripcsak and his team.
If you care about blood pressure, please read studies about unhealthy habits that could increase high blood pressure risk, and ibuprofen could damage kidneys when taken with some high blood pressure drugs.
For more information about blood pressure, please see recent studies that early time-restricted eating could help improve blood pressure, and results showing the best time to take high blood pressure drugs.
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