Hypertension: does the time of medication really matter?

in collaboration with

Dr Gérald Kierzek (Medical Director of Doctissimo)

Evening or morning? What if when you take a blood pressure medication really doesn’t matter? According to a preliminary study, presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, held in Barcelona at the end of August, the time of intake would not have any influence.

More than 20,000 volunteers

To reach this conclusion, the researchers followed more than 21,000 people with high blood pressure for five years. The volunteers were randomly assigned to take their blood pressure medication in the morning or in the evening. The authors of this work were also interested in hospitalizations for infarction, stroke or death due to cardiac pathology.

Take your treatment well

Finding: Over a five-year median, 3.4% of people taking medication at night were hospitalized for a heart attack, stroke, or died of cardiovascular disease compared with 3.7% who took their medication at night. morning.

For one of the lead authors, Thomas MacDonald, a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland, this work is ” one of the largest cardiovascular studies ever conducted and provides a definitive answer to the question of whether blood pressure medication should be taken in the morning or evening “. The most important thing is to take your treatment well.

Not taking initiative

For better compliance, doctors therefore advise their patients to take their medication at the right time, when they are likely to remember it. An opinion that is not shared by all, some doctors supporting the importance of taking antihypertensive treatment in the evening, or sometimes several times a day, because some drugs have a short duration of action and require several doses per day.

It is therefore necessary to refer to the recommendations of your doctor and possibly discuss them with him before changing the mode of taking your hypertensive medication.