Comparison of Optimal Hypertension Regimens

High blood pressure (Hypertension) is extremely common and is a major cause of heart disease, kidney disease and stroke. One in three of the UK (United Kingdom) population will require treatment for hypertension at some point in their lives. A healthy lifestyle alone is often not enough to control blood pressure, and drug treatment is usually required. Although a wide variety of drugs are available to treat hypertension, choosing the right kind of tablet or combination of tablets for individual patients is a problem, and therefore many people have poor blood pressure control. Hypertension treatment within the UK is currently selected according to age and self-defined ethnicity (SDE). There are limitations to this approach which include wide variability in the response to hypertension drug classes between people. There is also uncertainty about selecting hypertension drugs for ethnic minorities other than those of African/Caribbean ancestry, for example, South Asians because of a lack of information from trials. In the AIM HY-INFORM study the investigators are looking to recruit equal number of black/caribbean, south asian and white european participants to be able to compare differences in hypertension treatments and ethnicity. The primary objective of this study is to determine if the response to antihypertensive drugs differs by self defined ethnicity.