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ABSTRACT
The pharmacodynamics of hypertension medications can be significantly affected by circadian rhythms in the biological mechanisms of the 24 h blood pressure (BP) pattern. Hypertension guidelines fail to recommend the time of day when patients, including those who require treatment with multiple medications, are to ingest BP-lowering therapy. We conducted a systematic review of published prospective trials that investigated hypertension medications for ingestion-time differences in BP-lowering, safety, patient adherence, and markers of target organ pathology. Among the search-retried 155 trials, 17 published between 1991 and 2020 totaling 1,508 hypertensive participants concerned the differential ingestion-time dependent effects of 14 unique dual-combination therapies. All but one (94.1%) of the trials, involving 98.5% of the total number of investigated individuals, reported clinically and statistically significant benefits – including enhanced reduction of asleep BP without induction of sleep-time hypotension, reduced prevalence of BP non-dipping, decreased adverse effects, improved kidney function, and reduced cardiac pathology – when dual-combination hypertension medications were ingested at-bedtime/evening rather than upon-waking/morning. A systematic and comprehensive review of the literature published in the past three decades reveals no single dual-combination hypertension trial reported significantly better benefit of the still conventional, yet unjustified by medical evidence, upon-waking/morning hypertension treatment scheme.
Disclosure statement
Ramón C. Hermida, Michael H. Smolensky, Artemio Mojón, and José R. Fernández have shares of Circadian Ambulatory Technology & Diagnostics (CAT&D), a technology-based company developed by and in partnership with the University of Vigo.