THURSDAY, Feb. 14 (HealthDay News) -- Hypertensive and normotensive patients derive the same benefits from statins, and the presence of hypertensive patients in clinical trial cohorts does not influence the outcome, researchers report in the Feb. 1 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.
To assess the frequency of cardiac or cardiovascular death as well as major cardiac or cardiovascular events, Franz H. Messerli, M.D., of St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 12 trials involving 69,984 patients. Each trial enrolled at least 1,000 patients for a minimum of two years.
The overall reduction in cardiac death as a result of statin therapy was 24 percent, and the results were similar whether or not the study samples included patients with hypertension. This finding held regardless of how the study findings were analyzed, i.e., randomized trials, subgroup analyses or meta-regression.
"At first glance it should be surprising that statins do not confer more benefit in hypertensive than normotensive patients," the authors write. "The dictum 'the higher the risk the greater the benefit' may not necessarily apply to statin therapy."
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