Measuring the effects of antihypertensive therapy upon the quality of life.

After an explosion of interest at the beginning of the 1990s in measuring quality of life in hypertensive patients, the past few years have seen relatively few studies in this area. This is partly because when new drugs were compared, in general, no clear advantage was observed for any particular drug or class of antihypertensive. More recently the emphasis on choosing antihypertensive treatments that have been shown to be effective in reducing cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, as well as constraints on resources, have focused attention on older drugs such as diuretics. Only a few trials have measured quality of life on a diuretic, but the largest and most powerful of these found no evidence that diuretics impair quality of life.