"These unprecedented results signal a new era in how we treat patients with high blood pressure" -- Professor Björn Dahlöf, University of Göteborg, Sweden

ATLANTA, GA., USA - In one of the largest completed clinical trials of patients with hypertension, losartan became the first and only medicine to show superiority over a proven standard blood pressure medicine (the beta-blocker atenolol) in helping patients significantly reduce the combined risk of cardiovascular disease and death. These results also showed that losartan reduced the risk of stroke by 25 percent (p=0.001) versus atenolol in patients with high blood pressure.

"These unprecedented results signal a new era in how we treat patients with high blood pressure," said Professor Björn Dahlöf, M.D., Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Göteborg, Östra Hospital, Göteborg and lead investigator of the trial. "The superior cardiovascular benefits of losartan - which no blood pressure medicine has so clearly documented until now -- combined with losartan's excellent tolerability - represent a major step forward for physicians that is directly applicable to our daily clinical practice. Patients will ultimately benefit from these findings because these results demonstrate for the first time that selecting the appropriate treatment can help avoid the serious consequences of high blood pressure."

The results of this landmark study, known as LIFE (Losartan Intervention For Endpoint reduction in hypertension) were presented recently at the 51st Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of Cardiology and will be published in The Lancet on March 23. The study included 9,193 patients from Scandinavia, the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries who needed medicine to treat their high blood pressure. These patients also had an enlarged heart, or left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), a common complication of long-term hypertension.