Intensive hypertension treatment may help delay strokes as per a study published by Wiley in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
The study involved nine trials comprising 38,779 adults (average age ranging from 66 to 84 years) with follow-up times ranging from 2.0 to 5.8 years.
‘Strokes in older adults can be prevented or delayed by adopting more intensive hypertension treatment.’
It was found that it took 1.7 years to prevent 1 stroke for 200 older persons treated with more intensive hypertension treatment.
“While the 2017 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines recommend individual risk discussions about hypertension treatment for primary prevention in older adults, there is a critical gap in data about how long a patient needs to receive blood pressure treatment before they will benefitor the blood pressure treatment’s time to benefit. A treatment’s time to benefit is an especially important consideration for patients with a limited life expectancy who may experience immediate burdens or harms from any additional medication,” says lead author Vanessa S. Ho, MS, of California Northstate University College of Medicine.
The present study shows that older adults with higher baseline systolic blood pressure had a shorter time to benefit when compared to those who had a lower baseline systolic blood pressure.
Source: Medindia
