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June 8 (UPI) -- Adults 65 and older can extend their lives by taking blood pressure medications as prescribed, according to a study published Monday in the journal Hypertension. Researchers found that older adults who used blood pressure medications as prescribed lowered their risk for death during the seven-year study period by up to 44 percent.
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"Our findings definitely suggest that even in very frail people, anti-hypertensive treatment reduces the risk of death" over a seven-year period, study co-author Dr. Giuseppe Mancia, professor emeritus at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy, said in a press release.
More than 60 percent of all American adults over age 65 are living with high blood pressure, or hypertension, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For their research, Mancia and his colleagues reviewed data on nearly 1.3 million older adults -- with an average age of 76 -- in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, who received three or more high blood pressure medication prescriptions in 2011-2012.
Over the following seven years, researchers tracked the percentage of participants who continued taking the medications either until death or for the length of the study period.
Researchers compared roughly 255,000 people who died during the seven-year period with an age-, gender- and health-status-matched group of people who survived and divided them into four groups of health status -- good, medium, poor and very poor.
The probability of death over seven years was 16 percent for people rated in good health at the beginning of the study compared to 64 percent among those in very poor health, the researchers found.
Compared to people with very low adherence to blood pressure prescriptions, those with high adherence were 44 percent less likely to die if they started in good health and 33 percent less likely to die if they started in very poor health.
Prescription medications given to elderly people living in nursing homes or assisted-living homes in Italy are not included in the national database, so the study's results might only apply to elderly people living in the community, the authors said.
Because almost all medications are free or low-cost and dispensed by the public health service in Italy, this corresponds roughly to people's adherence in using the medication. As a result, the study's findings may not apply to countries with a different health care system, researchers said.
"Do your best to encourage and support patients to take their medications, because adherence is crucial to getting the benefits," Mancia said. "Medications do nothing if people don't take them."
