Discussant Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones commented, “What strikes me about HOPE-3 is that this is a population at risk, but not at particularly high risk.” And yet these patients benefited from statin therapy regardless of their baseline LDL, noted Dr. Lloyd-Jones, chair of the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, and an architect of the risk-based approach to statin use that’s a centerpiece of the current ACC/AHA guidelines on atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk reduction.
Dr. Sidney Smith
In an interview, Dr. Sidney C. Smith, Jr., said the HOPE-3 data are “worthy of consideration” as experts meet at ACC 16 to begin updating guidelines for the treatment of hypertension. In particular, the key findings that moderate-risk hypertensive patients benefited from a statin regardless of their baseline LDL and initiation of blood pressure-lowering therapy was beneficial for patients with a systolic blood pressure in the 140s but not in those with a systolic pressure in the 120s and 130s could be practice changing, according to Dr. Smith, professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Drs. Yusuf and Lonn reported receiving institutional research grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and AstraZeneca, which funded the trial.
Simultaneous with the presentation of the HOPE-3 results at ACC 16 in Chicago, the study on cholesterol lowering and the study on blood pressure and cholesterol lowering led by Dr. Yusef as well as the study on blood pressure lowering led by Dr. Lonn were published online at NEJM.org.