Comparative studies in hypertension: some fallacious claims of age-related drug efficacy

Many claims of age-related differential antihypertensive drug effects are invalid because of serious deficiencies in trial design and statistical analysis. Problems include the method of measurement of response, the lack of a suitable control group, the relationship between response and baseline blood pressure, the use of post hoc analyses and the pooling of data from separate trials. Thus far, only the serotonin antagonist ketanserin has been convincingly shown to have a greater antihypertensive effect in old than in young patients. While other drugs may have a similar age-related differential effect, this has not yet been demonstrated in sufficiently sound studies.