High blood pressure is a big health issue. It’s the main reason for strokes and can cause heart attacks and kidney failure.
Most of the time, we don’t know why it happens. People with high blood pressure need to take medicines their whole life.
The New Medicine: Baxdrostat
Baxdrostat is a new medicine. It can lower high blood pressure in people who do not get better with other medicines.
This result came from a test called a phase II trial, which the Queen Mary University of London and CinCor Pharma in the U.S. worked together on.
The results of the test were talked about at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions conference.
What the Trial Did and Found
The trial lasted 12 weeks. It had 248 patients. None of these patients’ high blood pressure got better even though they were taking three or more medicines.
They got either Baxdrostat or a fake medicine (a placebo). The amount of Baxdrostat they got was different: 2 mg, 1 mg, or 0.5 mg. The medicine was added to the ones they were already taking.
At the end of the trial, the group that got the highest amount of Baxdrostat saw a 20-point drop in blood pressure.
They were 11 points better than the group who got the fake medicine. This difference is big and not usually seen with other medicines.
How Baxdrostat Works
Baxdrostat works by stopping the body from making a hormone called aldosterone. This hormone controls the amount of salt in the body.
Baxdrostat lowered both blood and urine levels of aldosterone.
The trial showed that Baxdrostat can lower blood pressure a lot in patients whose high blood pressure does not get better with other drugs. These patients make too much aldosterone.
The hard part of making a drug like this was to make it target the enzyme that makes aldosterone, but not another enzyme that makes a hormone we need called cortisol.
What the Doctors Said
Professor Morris Brown, one of the study’s leaders, said the results are exciting.
But we need to test Baxdrostat more before we can say it’s as good as or better than other medicines.
It could give hope to many people whose high blood pressure does not get better with the usual treatment.
High Blood Pressure and Aldosterone
High blood pressure is common in adults in the UK.
About a third of adults have it. Recent studies have shown that in 5% to 10% of people with high blood pressure, the cause is a change in a gene in the adrenal glands.
This change makes them produce too much aldosterone. This could be more than 500,000 people in the UK.
Aldosterone makes the body keep more salt, which increases blood pressure. People with too much aldosterone in their blood do not respond well to usual blood pressure medicines.
Professor Brown has been working on Baxdrostat for over 10 years. He advised on the Baxdrostat trial in the U.S. and the earlier stages of the drug’s development.
If you care about blood pressure, please read studies about unhealthy habits that could increase high blood pressure risk, and eating eggs in a healthy diet may reduce risks of diabetes, and high blood pressure.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about antioxidants that could help reduce dementia risk, and higher magnesium intake could help benefit brain health.
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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