The results of the STEP study were presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) 2021 Congress! The main finding from this research was that an ideal target of 110 mmHg or at least <130 mmHg blood pressure (compared with a target of 130 mmHg or at least 150 mmHg) yielded an absolute risk reduction of composite events of…
ACC 2021 | Relive Renal Denervation with RADIANCE-HTN TRIO
Endovascular ultrasound renal denervation significantly reduces systolic blood pressure when compared against a sham procedure according to this new study presented at ACC 2021 simultaneously published in the Lancet. Renal denervation reduces ambulatory daily systolic blood pressure by 8 mmHg vs 3 mmHg in the sham procedure branch. This translates into a mean 4.5 mmHg…
ESC 2020 | Antihypertensive Therapy Reduces Events Regardless of BP Levels or Risk
Antihypertensive therapy reduces the risk of cardiovascular events even in patients with no history of heart disease or with normal baseline blood pressure (BP). This fuels a long-running debate about thresholds for hypertension diagnosis (which may or may not exist). Beyond that, the higher the baseline BP, the better the benefit. The decision to prescribe…
Another Scandal in Evidence-Based Medicine: Ambulatory BP Monitoring Questioned?
Apparently, the scandal surrounding the EXCEL trial kicked the hornet’s nest as far as evidence-based medicine is concerned. This time, the stars were the actual authors of an article published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM): the investigators retracted their paper due to issues in data analysis. The aforementioned work was originally…