Hypercholesterolemia as cardiovascular risk in hypertensive patients. Therapeutic implications: efficiency of statins.

Several epidemiological studies have already shown that hypertensive subjects are very often characterized by elevated levels of serum cholesterol, which increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases. It has been suggested that only the contemporary treatment of both cardiovascular risk factors is able to improve the individual cardiovascular risk profile even if, up to date, we still have limited results from large clinical trials regarding the impact of multiple therapeutic intervention in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. More scientific evidences came from the results of several clinical studies that have investigate the preventive and therapeutic role of hypolipidemic drugs, especially statins, in subjects with hypercholesterolemia and high blood pressure, particularly when those diseases are associated with diabetes. Indeed, this class of hypolipidemic agent has already shown to improve the individual lipid profile and contemporary to reduce the blood pressure values in the hypertensive hypercholesterolemic subjects acting synergistically with some class of anti-hypertensive drugs.