Prognostic Value of Systolic and Diastolic Blood Pressure in Treated Hypertensive Men: Clarification

We thank Dr Deedwania for the interest he expressed in his editorial¹ regarding our article entitled "Prognostic Value of Systolic and Diastolic Blood Pressure in Treated Hypertensive Men" that appeared in March 11, 2002, issue of the ARCHIVES.²

We would like to clarify some of the points he mentioned concerning the limitations of our study. First, data concerning the presence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the study population at the time of the initial evaluation are presented in the fourth paragraph of the "Methods" section. Upon study entry, 112 patients (2.4% of the entire study population) had concurrent CVD. We decided not to conduct separate analyses in high-risk patients due to the small numbers of these patients; stratifying these patients into smaller subgroups according to the systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels could lead to erroneous conclusions. Additional studies should be conducted in larger populations of treated hypertensive diabetic or coronary patients in order to clarify this point.