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Concerns that some antihypertensive medications, particularly thiazide diuretics and beta-blockers, can increase the risk for new-onset diabetes have been difficult to validate. Now, researchers have conducted a “network meta-analysis” to study new-onset diabetes in 22 long-term, randomized antihypertensive-drug trials (involving 143,158 subjects). This type of analysis enables comparison of different treatments across similar trials even when specific strategies have not been compared within trials.
When diuretics were used as the referent, the risk for incident diabetes was significantly lower with angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs; odds ratio, 0.57), ACE inhibitors (OR, 0.67), calcium-channel blockers (OR, 0.75), and placebo (OR, 0.77) …