Baxdrostat High Blood Pressure Cure, Digi Mart USA News: A new drug for high blood pressure has been found to be an unexpected permanent cure for a common cause of the condition, a breakthrough that could help over a million people in Britain.
The medicine, called baxdrostat, was designed to work by stopping the body from making a hormone called aldosterone, which raises blood pressure. A new study has found that it also has the surprise effect of killing the cells that overproduce the hormone, located in the adrenal glands on top of the kidneys.
The death of these cells is a major benefit for a subgroup of patients. For one in 10 people with high blood pressure, or hypertension, the cause is tiny benign tumors in the adrenal glands that make too much of the hormone.
Currently, hypertension caused by these tumors can be cured by surgery to remove the affected adrenal gland, although sometimes people do not know if they have the tumors.
A small study has suggested that taking baxdrostat for several months kills off the hormone-producing tumor cells, and the effect could be permanent. “It’s very exciting,” said Professor Morris Brown, a heart specialist at Queen Mary University of London who was involved in the study and predicted the benefit based on the drug’s animal trials over 10 years ago.
“It’s been my hope that one day we would go from chronic treatment to cure.”
Nearly a third of adults have high blood pressure, meaning the potential cure could benefit over a million people. The finding, published Saturday in The New England Journal of Medicine, came from an analysis of a larger trial conducted to gain approval of baxdrostat as a standard blood pressure medication that is taken long term.
The treatment was approved in the United States this year for people whose blood pressure remains dangerously high despite taking two or more other drugs. It is likely to become available in Britain next year under the same conditions, with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) currently deciding whether it will be offered on the NHS.
People with this kind of “stubborn” blood pressure are more likely to have adrenal gland tumors as the cause.
The baxdrostat approval trial was due to last three months. At the end of that period, 14 patients who had experienced large improvements, with an average fall of 25 millimeters of mercury in their systolic blood pressure, were allowed to continue on the drug.
They took it for between six and 12 months, then stopped.
So far, their blood pressure has continued to stay at the lower level for up to two years of follow-up, the analysis found. One person in the group has been off the drug for three years, Brown said.
“Longer follow-up may justify a claim that a finite course of medication leads to infinite cure,” he said. “That’s the hope.
Clearly we need a larger study, which is now under way, to really prove this.”
The drug may be killing the tumor cells because when it blocks production of aldosterone, it generates energetic compounds called reactive oxygen species, which are “very harmful to the cell,” Brown said. Mason Freeman, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who was also involved in the study, said: “This follow-up study has generated some extraordinary and unexpected findings.
“The sustained remission offers the exciting possibility that many patients with adrenal gland tumors may be treated with a once-a-day pill, perhaps for a limited period of time, and obtain similar benefits to what we now achieve only after major adrenal surgery.”
