Amiloride Hydrochloride

This study aims to evaluate the comparative risk of dementia/Alzheimer's disease onset between patients treated with medications that target specific metabolic pathways and patients treated with alternative medications for the same indication.

Resistant hypertension is defined as blood pressure that remains above goal despite concurrent use of three antihypertensive agents of different classes including diuretics. Patients with resistant hypertension has at least 1.5-fold higher cardiovascular risk than those with non-resistant hypertension. Therefore, controlling blood pressure is crucial in patients with resistant hypertension.
It has been unclear which antihypertensive agent should be added in patients who cannot reach target blood pressure despite use of three antihypertensive agents. There have been three randomized clinical trials that proved the efficacy of spironolactone in resistant hypertension, but they were small sized, comparison study to placebo. Recently published PATHWAY-2 study which compared the efficacy of spironolactone with placebo, doxazosin, and bisoprolol showed superiority of spironolactone in blood pressure lowering in patients with resistant hypertension. Thus, revised ACC/AHA and ESC/ESH guideline for arterial hypertension recommended spironolactone as the fourth agent for resistant hypertension. However, in real world, adherence to spironolactone may not be adequate because of adverse effect such as gynecomastia, hyperkalemia, and so on.
Recently, sub-study of PATHWAY-2 revealed that amiloride changes systolic blood pressure by -22.2 mmHg (95% CI, -24.7 to -19.7) which is comparable with the effect of spironolactone (-21.8 mmHg; 95% CI, -24.2 to -19.3). However, it was not randomized clinical trial to compare the effect between spironolactone and amiloride in patients with resistant hypertension.
This study aims to compare the effect of spironolactone and amiloride on home blood pressure in resistant hypertensive patients and to compare the rate of target blood pressure achievement between spironolactone and amiloride in resistant hypertensive patients.