Cheap but desirable: Generic drugs a great alternative to the brand-names for hypertension

(Press-News.org) Hypertension is a common medical condition and a primary cause of cardiovascular diseases and stroke worldwide. Unfortunately, as Professor Wei-Li Zhang of the Chinese National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases notes, "the unaffordability of drugs is a major barrier to medication adherence among patients living in low- and middle-income areas."

One of the countries where hypertension is becoming a major problem is China where, researchers estimate, between 244 million and 300 million adults are living with hypertension. But true to Prof. Zhang's words, most cases of hypertension in China are not adequately controlled, and patients who do seek treatment for hypertension must pay for outpatient clinic visits and bear medication costs out-of-pocket.

An emerging option for controlling the costs of antihypertensive pharmacotherapy is to prescribe generic drugs, which have the same active ingredients as their brand-name counterparts but cost substantially less. Several countries have taken steps to encourage the prescription of generic drugs as a way of reducing healthcare spending and enabling more patients, but some clinicians have reservations about prescribing generics due to concerns that such drugs may not be as effective as their brand-name counterparts. A team of researchers led by Prof. Zhang therefore decided to conduct an investigation to determine whether generic antihypertensive drugs are as effective as brand-name drugs at controlling blood pressure over the long term. Their results appear in a END