{"id":14803,"date":"2011-12-20T16:40:33","date_gmt":"2011-12-20T21:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?post_type=news&#038;p=14803"},"modified":"2011-12-20T16:40:33","modified_gmt":"2011-12-20T21:40:33","slug":"22-years-later-study-shows-life-prolonging-effect-of-antihypertensive-therapy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2011\/12\/20\/22-years-later-study-shows-life-prolonging-effect-of-antihypertensive-therapy\/","title":{"rendered":"22 Years Later, Study Shows Life-Prolonging Effect of Antihypertensive Therapy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After more than 20 years, the benefits of antihypertensive therapy are still evident, according to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/jama.ama-assn.org\/content\/306\/23\/2588.short\">a new paper published in\u00a0<em>JAMA<\/em><\/a>. John Kostis and colleagues performed a 22-year follow-up study on patients enrolled between 1985 and 1988 in the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/jama.ama-assn.org\/content\/265\/24\/3255.abstract?sid=f3158eef-2f92-4d69-9c17-839108df61ba\">Systolic Hypertension in the Elderly Program (SHEP) trial<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In 1991, SHEP found that\u00a0low-dose chlorthalidone in 4736 elderly patients with isolated systolic hypertension reduced the incidence of stroke and major cardiovascular events at 5 years, compared with placebo.\u00a0Now, with 22 years of follow-up data, the SHEP investigators report that patients who received active treatment during the trial had a significant gain in life expectancy. Each month of active treatment resulted in about one day extra in life expectancy.<\/p>\n<p>Life-expectancy gain:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>All-cause mortality: 105 days (CI\u00a0\u221239 to 242, p=0.07)<\/li>\n<li>Cardiovascular death:\u00a0158 days (CI 36-287, p=0.009)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At 22 years, overall mortality was not significantly different between the groups, but cardiovascular death was lower with active treatment:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>All-cause mortality: 59.9% in the active treatment group versus 60.5% in the placebo group (p=0.24)<\/li>\n<li>Cardiovascular death: \u00a028.3% versus 31.0% (p=0.03)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>In their discussion, the authors said that the &#8220;gain in life expectancy is important, because it occurred among persons with a mean age of 72 years at baseline.&#8221;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After more than 20 years, the benefits of antihypertensive therapy are still evident, according to\u00a0a new paper published in\u00a0JAMA. John Kostis and colleagues performed a 22-year follow-up study on patients enrolled between 1985 and 1988 in the\u00a0Systolic Hypertension in the Elderly Program (SHEP) trial. In 1991, SHEP found that\u00a0low-dose chlorthalidone in 4736 elderly patients with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[718,1076,454,1074,1075],"class_list":["post-14803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-prevention","tag-antihypertensive-therapy","tag-chlorthalidone","tag-hypertension","tag-shep","tag-systolic-hypertension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14803\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}