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(Hypertension. 2003;41:1006.)
© 2003 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial Commentary

Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial (ALLHAT)

Practical Implications

From the Vascular Biology and Hypertension Program, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Ala.

Correspondence to Suzanne Oparil, MD, Professor of Medicine, Physiology, and Biophysics, Director, Vascular Biology and Hypertension Program, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 703 19th Street South, ZRB 1034, Birmingham, AL 35294. E-mail soparil@uab.edu

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

	Rationale

 
The Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial (ALLHAT), sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), is the largest outcome trial of antihypertensive treatment ever carried out and the only large blood pressure (BP) trial to be carried out in a US population in the past decade.¹ The rationale for ALLHAT, which was designed in the early 1990s, was the urgent need to determine which of the several classes of antihypertensive drugs that had been developed and released for clinical use was most effective in preventing coronary heart disease (CHD), defined as fatal CHD and nonfatal myocardial infarction.²

The only randomized trials that had previously compared representatives of the antihypertensive drug classes, the Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Study Group on Antihypertensive Agents³ and the Treatment of Mild Hypertension Study (TOMHS),⁴ showed BP reductions with all classes but were not powered to evaluate CHD outcomes. Further, prior outcome trials had shown that the reduction in CHD event rates with antihypertensive treatment was less than expected based on epidemiologic data.⁵ Adverse effects of study drugs, particularly diuretics, including hypokalemia, hypomagnesemia, hyperuricemia, hyperlipidemia, insulin resistance, and ventricular ectopic activity, had been adduced to account for the disappointing outcomes of earlier trials by offsetting the beneficial effects of BP reduction.^6,7 To further complicate the picture, benefits beyond BP reduction had been attributed to some antihypertensive drug classes, ie, improved survival and reduced morbidity in persons with heart failure or left ventricular dysfunction treated with angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors^8–10 . . . [Full Text of this Article]