TY - JOUR
T1 - Simple, shared guidelines raise the quality of antihypertensive treatment in routine care
AU - Avanzini, Fausto
AU - Corsetti, Alessandra
AU - Maglione, Teresa
AU - Alli, Claudio
AU - Colombo, Fabio
AU - Torri, Valter
AU - Floriani, Irene
AU - Tognoni, Gianni
PY - 2002/10/1
Y1 - 2002/10/1
N2 - Aims: To assess the impact of simple, collectively produced, evidence-based guidelines on optimizing the choice of anti-hypertensive drugs in routine care. Methods and Results: Forty-eight physicians agreed to produce and test these guidelines for 1 year in their daily practice on a random sample of 1049 treated hypertensive patients (intervention group). A control group of 42 general practitioners recruited and followed up for 1 year a parallel nonintervention cohort of 722 treated hypertensive patients. After 1 year of follow-up, the patients in the nonintervention group had no changes in any of the predefined end points. In the intervention group, the use of diuretics and β-blockers-drugs with documented preventive efficacy-increased, respectively, from 48.3% to 57.6% and from 22.0% to 29.7%; and the proportion of hypertensive patients receiving indicated drugs (with no contraindications) rose from 66.1% to 73.0%. The prescription of poorly tolerated drugs decreased from 12.4% to 7.2%, and noncompliance with the antihypertensive therapy decreased from 5.2% to 3.8%. In the intervention group, both systolic and diastolic blood pressure control improved (systolic pressure
AB - Aims: To assess the impact of simple, collectively produced, evidence-based guidelines on optimizing the choice of anti-hypertensive drugs in routine care. Methods and Results: Forty-eight physicians agreed to produce and test these guidelines for 1 year in their daily practice on a random sample of 1049 treated hypertensive patients (intervention group). A control group of 42 general practitioners recruited and followed up for 1 year a parallel nonintervention cohort of 722 treated hypertensive patients. After 1 year of follow-up, the patients in the nonintervention group had no changes in any of the predefined end points. In the intervention group, the use of diuretics and β-blockers-drugs with documented preventive efficacy-increased, respectively, from 48.3% to 57.6% and from 22.0% to 29.7%; and the proportion of hypertensive patients receiving indicated drugs (with no contraindications) rose from 66.1% to 73.0%. The prescription of poorly tolerated drugs decreased from 12.4% to 7.2%, and noncompliance with the antihypertensive therapy decreased from 5.2% to 3.8%. In the intervention group, both systolic and diastolic blood pressure control improved (systolic pressure
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U2 - 10.1016/S0002-8703(02)00149-7
DO - 10.1016/S0002-8703(02)00149-7
M3 - Article
C2 - 12360171
AN - SCOPUS:0036791184
VL - 144
SP - 726
EP - 732
JO - American Heart Journal
JF - American Heart Journal
SN - 0002-8703
IS - 4
ER -