Preventive Effects of Antihypertensive Agents Stratified by Age and Blood Pressure

Hypertension persists as a major threat to cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health. Just how potent are our available pharmacological antihypertensive agents to reduce risk? In a remarkable feat of data aggregation, investigators brought together individual participant–level data on nearly 360,000 participants from 51 large, randomized trials of blood pressure–lowering treatments to assess effects on cardiovascular events overall and in age-stratified and blood pressure–stratified groups.

Younger participants had a greater relative reduction in risk for major cardiovascular events than older participants, but benefits spanned all ages, except for those 85 years and older (though data were more limited for this group). A reduction of 5 mm H…