Modern blood-pressure treatments are less likely to be associated with new cases of diabetes than older medicines — William Elliott of Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, and colleagues reported in the Lancet medical journal.
The propensity of some blood-pressure-lowering drugs to reduce glucose tolerance and trigger diabetes has been known for some time but a meta-analysis of past clinical trials found the danger was less with angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs) and angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitors (ACE).
Their study was based on a systematic review of 22 clinical trials involving 143,000 patients who did not have diabetes when they were started on the different medicines.