A new tool called the Blood Pressure Treatment Efficacy Calculator can help doctors choose the best medications for lowering blood pressure. It was created using information from nearly 500 clinical trials and over 100,000 people.
This tool helps doctors know how much different medicines can lower a person’s blood pressure. This is important because even a small drop in blood pressure (like 1 mmHg) can reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Doctors usually start with just one medicine, which lowers blood pressure by about 8–9 mmHg. But many people need a bigger drop — sometimes 15 to 30 mmHg — to stay healthy. With so many drugs and doses available, it can be hard to know which combination works best. This new calculator makes it easier.
The calculator groups medications into three levels — low, medium, and high — depending on how strong their effects are. Doctors can now set a goal for how much they want to lower blood pressure and use the calculator to find the best treatment plan right away.
One big problem with managing blood pressure has been that it changes a lot — from hour to hour, day to day, and even with the seasons. That makes it difficult to know whether a drug is working just by taking regular readings.
Dr. Nelson Wang from The George Institute said, “Blood pressure numbers can change randomly, so it’s hard to tell if a drug is helping. The calculator looks at lots of past data and gives a more reliable estimate.”
Dr. Anthony Rodgers added that this calculator challenges the old way of slowly adjusting treatments over time. Instead, doctors can use the calculator to start patients on a better plan from the beginning.
This tool may help with a serious global health issue. High blood pressure affects around 1.3 billion people worldwide and causes about 10 million deaths every year. Many people don’t know they have it, and even fewer have it under control.
If more people used this tool and received better treatments, it could save millions of lives.
If you care about high blood pressure, please read studies that early time-restricted eating could help improve blood pressure, and natural coconut sugar could help reduce blood pressure and artery stiffness.
For more information about blood pressure, please see recent studies about How to eat your way to healthy blood pressure and results showing that Modified traditional Chinese cuisine can lower blood pressure.
The study is published in The Lancet.
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