Interpreting age-related aspects of antihypertensive treatment: statistical defects and their remedy

Much of the literature concerning age-related effects in hypertension and its treatment suffers from serious deficiencies in statistical design and analysis. The problems include the measurement of response to treatment, the lack of a suitable control group, the way response is related to baseline blood pressure, the interpretation of post hoc analyses and the pooling of data from related but different studies. We discuss these problems and attempt to identify solutions which give a satisfactory balance between scientific validity and the practical issues of conducting clinical trials in hypertension.