Do blood pressure-lowering regimens reduce major cardiovascular events in high-risk patients regardless of baseline blood pressure?
Blood pressure-lowering regimens provide cardiovascular benefits in high-risk patients regardless of their baseline blood pressure levels, supporting further BP reduction even when initial targets are met.
It appears unlikely that the effectiveness of blood pressure-lowering treatments depends substantively upon starting blood pressure level. As the majority of patients in the trials contributing to these overviews had a history of hypertension or were receiving background blood pressure-lowering therapy, the findings suggest that additional blood pressure reduction in hypertensive patients meeting initial blood pressure targets will produce further benefits. More broadly, the data are supportive of the utilization of blood pressure-lowering regimens in high-risk patients with and without hypertension.
Czernichow et al. (2010) studied this question.
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