Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Randomised controlled trial
In individuals at intermediate risk for cardiovascular disease, treatment with rosuvastatin but not candesartan plus hydrochlorothiazide lowers cardiovascular disease event rates
  1. Michael LeFevre
  1. Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA
  1. Correspondence to: Professor Michael LeFevre, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Missouri, M224 Health Sciences Center, Columbia, MO 65212, USA; lefevrem{at}health.missouri.edu

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Commentary on: OpenUrlCrossRefPubMed. Yusuf S, Bosch J, Dagenais G, et al. Cholesterol lowering in intermediate-risk persons without cardiovascular disease. N Engl J Med 2016;374:2021–31.

Context

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the number one cause of death globally: more people die annually from CVDs than from any other cause.1 The incidence of CVD rises progressively with increasing blood pressure (BP) and with increasing levels of total and low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Pharmacological treatment of BP with several classes of drugs and of lipids with HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors (statins) have been demonstrated to reduce the incidence of CVD.2 ,3 Antihypertensive trials have predominantly enrolled individuals at specific BP levels and titrated medications to achieve either a specific target BP or a specific decrease in BP. In contrast, lipid trials have enrolled individuals at increased risk for CVD, most commonly with increased LDL, and treated with a fixed dose of a statin with no specific target. A major clinical question remains inadequately answered with existing evidence: who should be treated with medications for BP or lipids for primary prevention of CVD?

Methods

The Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation (HOPE)-3 trial was a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial (RCT) at 228 centres in 21 countries, using a 2×2 factorial design. The trial included men aged ≥55 years and women aged ≥65 years without CVD who had at least one of the following CVD risk factors: elevated waist-to-hip ratio, history of low concentration of high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, tobacco use, dysglycaemia, family history of premature coronary artery disease, …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.