Anti-anxiety drugs help lower blood pressure

Anti anxiety treatment helps in lowering blood pressure in patients experiencing an episode of highly elevated blood pressure, also known as acute hypertensive crisis, without organ damage. Patients whose hypertension is normally controlled with medication may have an episode of highly elevated blood pressure sometimes accompanied with headache and other non-specific complaints. Researchers from the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel found that in many cases, this hypertensive crisis is related to anxiety or panic attacks. The researchers designed a study to compare the effectiveness and safety of the anti-anxiety drug diazepam (Valium) with the anti-hypertension drug captopril (Capoten), administered under the tongue, in 36 adults seen in the emergency room in hypertensive crisis. The subjects had a BP greater than 190/110 mm Hg without evidence of acute target organ damage. The normal cut-off for a diagnosis of hypertension is 140/80 mm Hg. Neither the nurses who measured the BP nor the physicians who assessed the response were told which treatment was being administered. The researchers randomly assigned 19 subjects to 5 mg oral diazepam and 17 subjects to 25 mg sublingual captopril. They monitored BP and heart rate hourly for 3 hours. Both treatments decreased BP significantly and similarly. BP fell from 213/105 to 170/88 mm Hg in the diazepam group and from 208/107 to 181/95 mm Hg in the captopril group. Both treatments were well tolerated and no abrupt decrease in BP was observed. The findings suggest that anti-anxiety treatment is effective in lowering blood pressure in most patients with acute elevation of blood pressure. These results, justify performing a larger trial to confirm the benefits of anti-anxiety drugs for treatment of patient with hypertensive crisis without organ damage.