High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, affects millions of people all over the world.
It’s a common health problem, and many people are prescribed daily pills to help manage it. But there’s a big issue—many people forget to take their medicine every day.
In fact, more than half of all people with high blood pressure have trouble remembering to take their pills. When this happens, their blood pressure can rise again, and this increases the risk of serious health problems like heart attacks, strokes, and even early death.
Because of this, scientists have been looking for easier ways to help people control their blood pressure. One new solution that shows a lot of promise is a drug called zilebesiran. Researchers, including a team from the University of Edinburgh, are testing this new drug to see if it could be a better option for people with high blood pressure.
Zilebesiran is different from the usual pills that people take every day. Instead of needing to take it daily, this drug could be given as a single injection and continue to work for up to six months.
That means someone could control their blood pressure with just two injections a year. This would make things much easier for people who struggle to remember daily medication.
In a clinical trial in the UK, scientists tested zilebesiran on a group of 107 people with high blood pressure. Out of these, 80 people received a single injection of the drug, while the rest were given a placebo, which looks like medicine but doesn’t have any active ingredients. The people who received zilebesiran saw a big drop in their systolic blood pressure.
This number shows how much pressure your blood is putting on your artery walls when your heart beats. For those who got a 200mg dose, their blood pressure went down by over 10 points. For people who received 800mg, it dropped by more than 20 points.
These changes are enough to bring blood pressure into a much healthier range and can reduce the chance of serious problems.
So how does this new drug work? Zilebesiran was created by a company in the United States called Alnylam. It works by targeting a hormone called angiotensin. This hormone causes blood vessels to tighten, which makes blood pressure go up.
Zilebesiran works in the liver to stop a protein called angiotensinogen from being made. This protein is the first step in making angiotensin. Without it, the blood vessels can stay relaxed and open, which helps lower the pressure.
The early results of the study are encouraging, but researchers still need to do more work. They want to make sure zilebesiran is safe for people to use for a long time.
Professor David Webb from the University of Edinburgh said this could be an important step forward because there hasn’t been a new type of blood pressure drug in almost 20 years. If zilebesiran continues to show good results in larger studies, it could become a much easier option for many people.
In the future, if the drug is approved, it might help millions of people manage their blood pressure more effectively. But while we wait for more research, it’s still very important to take care of our health in other ways. Eating healthy foods, cutting back on salt, exercising regularly, and keeping a healthy weight can all help keep blood pressure under control.
There are also other interesting studies going on about how food and lifestyle affect blood pressure. For example, eating more fiber or foods like potatoes might help some people lower their blood pressure. But for people who still struggle to keep their numbers in a safe range, zilebesiran could be a simple and powerful solution in the near future.
If you’d like to read more, the full study results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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