Clinical Medicine Reviews in Vascular Health

Hypertension is one of the most important and prevalent major cardiovascular risk factors. It is also a risk factor for medical problems leading to a marked increase in cardiovascular risk. Thus, appropriate and efficacious management of patients with hypertension is important. There is also an ongoing debate regarding whether major drug subgroups differ in their ability to protect against total cardiovascular risk or etiology-specific cardiovascular events, such as stroke and myocardial infarction. Hypertension guidelines, based on experience from clinical trials, recognize that many individuals will require ≥2 antihypertensive agents at appropriate doses, either in fixed combination or as separate prescriptions, to achieve their BP goal, particularly in patients at high cardiovascular risk. If possible, initiation of fixed-dose combinations should be chosen, because of the advantages for compliance to treatment. In this context, we aimed to review fixed-dose combinations of irbesartan/hydrochlorothiazide in the management of hypertension.