Status of current therapies for hypertension.

Specific antihypertensive therapy has been in common clinical use for about four decades. During this relatively short period of time remarkable progress has been made in many regards. The value of lowering elevated arterial pressure has been documented in a number of intervention trials. Initially, such studies comprised patients with malignant hypertension only, but later large-scale studies have comprised patients with non-malignant forms of hypertension. At the same time numerous new pharmacological principles have been taken into clinical use in the treatment of hypertension. It is the purpose of this brief review to sum up some of the important steps that have been taken in this area during previous decades and to try to evaluate the status of current therapies for hypertension. Special emphasis will be given to some of the remaining issues and questions that are currently under investigation, such as the place of novel therapies, e.g. calcium antagonists and ACE-inhibitors, and the issue of the level to which blood pressure should be lowered in order to extract the maximum benefit of antihypertensive treatment. Some of the ongoing large-scale intervention trials in hypertension, e.g. the CAPPP Study, the NORDIL Study, the HOT Study and the STOP Hypertension-2 study, will be reviewed.