Nijmegen Antihypertensive Management Improvement Study

High blood pressure is an important risk factor for diseases of heart and blood vessels like myocardial infarction and stroke. Many patients are not treated to target blood pressures, even though good blood pressure lowering drugs are available. Not all blood pressure drugs are equally effective in individual patients. We hypothesize that individual patient characteristics can predict the best response on different blood pressure lowering drugs. In this study we will investigate whether a set of patient characteristics (anthropometric and laboratory) obtained before treatment may predict the blood pressure lowering response to representatives of two groups of drugs: those that inhibit renin-angiotensin system activity and those that decrease blood volume.