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Managing high blood pressure is a massive task for many people due to the stress and not being able to live a healthy life. Pills have had a major role to play in managing hypertension, but the reluctance to take medicines isn't helping the cause of the patients.
However, a new guideline has come from the experts of the European Society of Cardiology and the European Society of Hypertension on arterial hypertension that patients should go for two blood pressure lowering drugs than one to manage the disease in a better way.
Previously the patients were given one medicine to begin with and then were later given two and upgraded to three if the need be. And that's why the experts have called it the physicians inertia, where the doctors fail to initiate the treatment of hypertension or heart disease in patients.
According to the experts, at least 80 per cent of the patients should have been upgraded to two drugs, but they still are on one drug. And it has also been recognised that blood pressure control rate is poor because the patients do not take their pills on time.
The recommendations, which were published in the European Heart Journal, says that non-adherence increases with the number of pills, so putting the two drugs (or three if needed) in a single tablet could transform blood pressure control rates.
Bryan Williams, ESC Chairperson of the Guidelines Task Force, from the University College London in the UK said that the vast majority of patients with high blood pressure need to start the treatment with two drugs as a single pill. He added that those pills were already available and will massively improve the success of treatment, with corresponding reductions in strokes, heart disease, and early deaths.
More than one billion people have hypertension (high blood pressure) around the world and if these recommendations from the ESC and ESH are put in place, then we will definitely see a safer world as hypertension led to 10 million premature deaths.
Image source: Shutterstock
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