Blood Pressure Meds Best Taken Before Bed

Heart conditions such as strokes and heart attacks can be drastically reduced in patients with hypertension at no extra effort or cost if blood pressure-lowering medications are taken before bed rather than first thing in the morning. This is the result found in a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN).

The time of day when patients take blood pressure-lowering medications can affect their blood pressure patterns, but does it make any difference to their health? RamÃ³n Hermida, PhD (University of Vigo, in Spain) and his colleagues studied this question in a group of 661 patients who had chronic kidney disease and hypertension. Half of the patients took all prescribed blood pressure-lowering medications first thing in the morning and half took at least one of them at bedtime.

Benefits of Blood Pressure Tablets on your Health
Hypertension affects about a billion individuals worldwide and is a silent killer. Medication & lifestyle modification is the cornerstone of an effective antihypertensive treatment.

After an average follow-up of 5.4 years, patients who took at least one blood pressure-lowering medication at bedtime had better control of their blood pressure and were about one-third as likely to experience a heart-related event such as a heart attack, a stroke, or heart failure compared to patients who took their medications upon awakening. Also, sleep-time blood pressure was a much more accurate measure of heart health than wake-time blood pressure.

"Our results indicate that cardiovascular event rates in patients with hypertension can be reduced by more than 50% with a zero-cost strategy of administering blood pressure-lowering medications at bedtime rather than in the morning," said Dr. Hermida. "This study also documents for the first time that sleep-time blood pressure is the most relevant independent marker of cardiovascular risk," he added.

Study co-authors include Diana Ayala, MD, PhD, Artemio MojÃ³n, PhD, JosÃ© FernÃ¡ndez, PhD (University of Vigo, in Spain.)

Blood Pressure Screening
Hypertension accounts for nearly 6% of deaths worldwide.

Disclosures: The authors reported no financial disclosures.

The article, entitled "Bedtime Dosing of Antihypertensive Medications Reduces Cardiovascular Risk in CKD," will appear online at http://jasn.asnjournals.org/ on Monday, October 24, 2011, doi:10.1681/ASN.2011040361.

Blood Pressure Chart
Blood pressure is the pressure of the blood flowing through your blood vessels against the vessel walls. Just by entering you age, you can get the accurate range of blood pressure value.

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Source-Newswise