The Adalat® symposium ‘From diagnosis to target BP – investigating optimal antihypertensive strategies’ was attended by more than 300 delegates – with little room to stand. Attendees were engaged by a panel of highly renowned experts in the field of hypertension and cardiovascular (CV) medicine that included Henry Elliott (UK), Franz Messerli (USA), Giuseppe Mancia (Italy) and Luis Ruilope (Spain).
Chaired by Hermann Haller (Germany), the program looked not only at clinical evidence supporting Adalat®, alone and as a combination therapy partner for controlling blood pressure (BP) and managing CVD, but how the current GITS formulation is key to the benefits observed.
Franz Messerli provided a number of important take home messages regarding some of the misconceptions about CCBs. He stressed that as an antihypertensive drug class, CCBs fulfil the criteria for agents that safely and effectively lower BP in a range of patients, providing benefits beyond BP control, and which can be usefully combined with other antihypertensive drug classes.
Giuseppe Mancia and Luis Ruilope comprehensively addressed one of the most topical issues in hypertension management – optimizing BP control through combination therapy, and tailoring drug choices to underlying CV risk. They provided evidence from trials such as INSIGHT, ACTION, ASCOT and ACCOMPLISH and recommendations from current treatment guidelines to show how CCBs should be considered the mainstay of combination antihypertensive therapy.
