Blood Test for Right Blood Pressure Meds

Tests Should Be Part of Routine Care, Experts Say
(ABC News) — Tests for a blood-pressure regulating hormone called renin may help doctors decide which blood pressure drugs their patients should take, researchers said on Wednesday.

They said a mismatch between drugs and patient characteristics may help explain why many people do not benefit from blood pressure drugs, and testing for renin levels may help.

“The one-size-fits-all approach must be abandoned,” said Dr. Curt Furberg of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, who wrote a commentary on the studies in the American Journal of Hypertension.

Currently, fewer than half of patients are helped when they take just one blood pressure drug, and many must take more than one to keep blood pressure down.

A study in May in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that about half of the 65 million people in the United States with high blood pressure have it under control.

Furberg said researchers have known for years that patients respond differently to different drugs for high blood pressure, yet this has not translated into tests and strategies that help find the best treatments for individual patients.

In a series of studies in the same journal, three research teams looked at different aspects of this problem.

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