Hindsight: Antihypertensive Treatments in Obesity

Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. Jürgen E. Scholze, Charité, Berlin

Together with my colleagues Pischon, Engeli, and Juergen Scholze, we argued that some classes of antihypertensive agents may have potentially unwanted effects on some of the metabolic and haemodynamic abnormalities that link obesity and hypertension and noted that most hypertension guidelines fail to provide specific advice on the pharmacological management of obese patients, perhaps not surprising, as we failed to find even a single study examining the efficacy of specific antihypertensive agents in reducing mortality in obese hypertensive patients.

We nevertheless, discussed the theoretical reasons for the differential use of the major classes of antihypertensive agents in the pharmacological management of obesity related hypertension and also considers the potential role of anti-obesity agents.

Since then, many hypertension studies have included sub analyses of their outcomes in obese participants and given the increasing use of fixed combination agents, some of our discussion points raised in this paper may be considered moot. At the time, however, there was clearly a gap in the literature on this issue.

According to Google Scholar, this paper has been cited 63 times

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