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Objective: The 2018 guidelines for the management of arterial hypertension by the European Societies of Hypertension and Cardiology recommend prescription of two or more antihypertensive drugs in a single pill combination (SPC). The aim of this analysis was to assess implementation of this recommendation and compare prescriptions of SPCs in 2019 and 2021. Design and method: We performed a retrospective, exploratory analysis from a hospital database that included patients hospitalized in internal medicine wards at a tertiary hospital during two time periods (01.10.-30.11.2019/01.06.-31.07.2021). Exclusion criteria were acute cardiovascular hospitalisation, symptomatic elevated blood pressure (BP) values and an age 1, in 2021, 90/131 (68.7%), p-value 0.147. Median maximum systolic BP (with SPC) was 165 mmHg versus 162 mmHg (without SPC), p-value 0.539. Median maximum diastolic BP was 93 mmHg (with SPC) versus 92 mmHg (without SPC), p-value 0.638. Conclusions: Overall, our results showed no significant increase of patients treated with SPC at baseline and of the daily number of antihypertensive pills >1 in 2021. A significantly higher rate of treatment modification was found in patients who already had a SPC in their initial treatment. There was no statistically significant difference in the occurrence of AE during and after hospitalisation between patients with or without SPCs, though numerically, there were less AE after discharge in patients with SPCs.
Vischer et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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