ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Despite the availability of numerous safe and effective antihypertensive drugs, the number of patients achieving adequate blood pressure (BP) guideline targets remains unacceptably low (1-3). Of the overall hypertensive population, 5%–30% has resistant hypertension (3). Causes of this disorder are well known and include reluctance of patients to adhere to lifelong drug treatment, physician inertia, the white-coat effect, effects of conflicting drugs (e.g., nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), or poorly selected antihypertensive drugs (4). About 10% of the patients have true resistant hypertension, which means that there are patients in whom adequate control of BP cannot be achieved as confirmed by 24-hour ambulatory BP (4,5).
