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Implications of ALLHAT and ELITE II

Arch Intern Med. 2001;161:511-512.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

AS THE most common disease encountered by medical practitioners, hypertension continues to attract new therapies that promise greater efficacy and fewer adverse effects than currently available drugs. The most recently introduced new class of antihypertensive drugs, the angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs), is the fastest-growing group, having been prescribed in the United States more than 23 million times in 1999, only a few years after their introduction. With 6 ARBs now available, and more likely on the way, they are widely touted as a major advance, in part because of their tolerability.^{1, 2}

However, heeding the call of the prophets of evidence-based medicine and in the absence of any outcome data about the new drugs, the expert committees that have issued the most recent guidelines for the management of hypertension^{3, 4, 5, 6} have uniformly recommended that ARBs only be prescribed if the patient is intolerant of an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor (usually because . . . [Full Text of this Article]

WAITING MAY BE WISE


CONCLUSIONS

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