A new drug being tested by researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine could offer hope for people with high blood pressure that doesn’t respond well to current treatments.
The medication, called lorundrostat, was found to significantly lower blood pressure in a recent clinical trial. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
High blood pressure, or hypertension, is one of the most common health problems in the United States. It affects nearly 120 million adults—about half of all grown-ups in the country.
Even though many people don’t feel any symptoms, hypertension is the number one cause of heart disease. For some, standard medications aren’t enough to keep it under control. This is called treatment-resistant hypertension.
The research team, led by Dr. Michael Wilkinson, tested lorundrostat in a nationwide clinical trial involving 285 participants. These individuals all had high blood pressure that remained too high despite being on medication. The trial was done at several locations, including UC San Diego Health and the Cleveland Clinic.
The goal was to see if lorundrostat, which works by blocking a hormone called aldosterone, could help lower blood pressure in people who hadn’t responded well to other medications.
Aldosterone helps control how much salt and water the body keeps, which affects blood pressure. But in some people, this hormone gets out of balance and leads to high blood pressure that’s difficult to treat.
To run the test fairly, all participants were first given a standard blood pressure medicine for three weeks to establish a baseline. After that, 190 people were given lorundrostat, while the other 95 were given a placebo—a substance with no active drug. Neither the participants nor the doctors knew who received which treatment.
The results were encouraging. People who took lorundrostat had an average drop of 15 points in their systolic blood pressure—the top number in a blood pressure reading. In comparison, those who got the placebo saw only a 7-point drop.
Each participant wore a monitor that tracked their blood pressure over 24-hour periods at the beginning, middle, and end of the 12-week study. This helped researchers get a clear picture of how the drug worked throughout the day and night.
Even though some participants still had higher-than-normal blood pressure at the end of the study, the fact that their levels dropped at all was promising. Many of them had struggled for years to lower their blood pressure despite trying several medications. Dr. Wilkinson said that the drug could become a helpful new option for those patients.
Another strength of this study was its diverse group of participants, which included people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds. This is important because hypertension often affects some groups more than others, and treatments don’t always work the same way for everyone.
The next step for lorundrostat is a larger Phase III clinical trial, which will further test its safety and effectiveness in a broader group of people. If results continue to be positive, the drug may eventually become available as a new option for patients who need better ways to control their high blood pressure.
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The research findings can be found in New England Journal of Medicine.
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