The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said last week that it was initiating a review of the combined use of agents that block the renin-angiotensin system (RAS). The three classes of RAS-blocking drugs (ACE inhibitors, ARBs, and direct renin inhibitors) are used to treat hypertension and congestive heart failure. The EMA said that the review was being performed…

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This week’s topics include the effect of aliskiren on postdischarge mortality and readmissions among those hospitalized for HF, PFO closure, and more.

The diuretics chlorthalidone and hydrochlorothiazide are similarly effective at preventing cardiovascular events among older adults with hypertension, but electrolyte abnormalities are more common with chlorthalidone, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Canadian researchers used healthcare databases to identify nearly 30,000 adults over age 65 recently prescribed varying doses of chlorthalidone or…

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This week’s topics include the relationship between hospital readmission and mortality rates for those hospitalized with acute MI, HF, or pneumonia, the effects of body size and hypertension treatments on CV event rates, and more.

The already hot field of renal denervation for resistant hypertension just got a little hotter. With the announcement of a clinical trial powered to detect improvements in cardiovascular outcomes, St. Jude Medical has raised the stakes in the field and demonstrated a new level of commitment to the innovative new technology. For the past few…

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There’s a glimmer of good news amidst all the recent bad news about diabetes. Although the prevalence of diabetes has doubled over the last generation, more people today are reaching their treatment goals than in the past. New data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES), published online today in Diabetes Care, show that efforts to control hemoglobin…

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The enormous success of ACE inhibitors in hypertension and heart failure spurred hope that adding a second drug to block the renin-angiotensin system would yield improved outcomes. Although definitive evidence supporting dual blockade of the renin-angiotensin system has never been found, more than 200,000 patients in the U.S. currently receive this therapy. Now a large new meta-analysis…

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Is Renal Denervation a cure? A likely overused “magic bullet” in patients who should receive more behavior modification and drug treatment? Where exactly should it fit in our arsenal? John Ryan interviews Murray David Esler

Denervation of the renal sympathetic nerve may become an important new tool in the fight against resistant hypertension.  Previously, the main results of the Symplicity HTN-2 trial demonstrated that in selected patients renal denervation resulted in a large and highly significant reduction in systolic blood pressure (BP) at six months. Now, longer followup from the trial, published in Circulation,…

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The hypertension field has been troubled by repeated observations that normal weight patients have more cardiovascular (CV) events than obese patients. Now a new analysis of a large hypertension trial confirms this finding but also suggests that it may be explained by either an adverse effect of diuretics or a protective effect of calcium-channel blockers in non-obese…

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