Importance of medication adherence from the ONTARGET and TRANSCEND points of view.

Medication adherence is crucial to improve the prognosis of patients with hypertension. Importantly, the variables associated with antihypertensive medication withdrawal do not occur immediately after the cessation, but likely in the following years. Nevertheless, since the current randomized clinical trials are limited to a short or mid follow-up, the results provided from these studies cannot exactly reflect the importance of the therapy discontinuation. We discuss about two recent examples, the ONTARGET and the TRANSCEND trials, in which the inclusion of the discontinuation rates in the primary analysis change the results of these studies and subsequently, the interpretation of the data.