Effect of Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) Treatment in the Control of Refractory Hypertension

OBJECTIVE. To evaluate the effect of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment on the blood-pressure (BP) levels of patients with refractory arterial hypertension (AHT-r). METHODS: Multicenter randomized study with parallel groups and blind final evaluation. Patients will be recruited from AHT, nephrology or internal medicine outpatient clinics and will satisfy the criteria for AHT-r (patients requiring 3 anti-AHT drugs at recommended doses to maintain their blood-pressure levels within AMPA \[24-hours ambulatory monitoring of blood pressure values) excluding those forms of secondary AHT and those patients with incapacitating hypersomnia that need immediate treatment. In all, 210 patients will be included (105 per arm for intention to treat analysis) in accordance with the calculation of the sample size needed including drop-outs to evaluate a clinically significant minimum drop of 4-5 mmHg in the mean BP and the number of centers (21 centers; 10 patients per center). They will all be subjected to a complete clinical history, an AMPA study, a blood test (with serum retained for a later determination of biological mediators) and a sleep study. Those patients with an AHI\>15 will be randomized to receive CPAP vs habitual control. The treatment will last 3 months. The same variables that were measured before the randomization will be analyzed again for the purposes of comparison. The comparison of results will be undertaken on the basis of an intention-to-treat and per-protocol analyses based on adherence to CPAP treatment at different cutoff of hours /day by means of an ANOVA two-way analysis (one of them being time).