Introduction:

Therapy with antiplatelet drugs is recommended as secondary prevention of cardiovascular events in people with arterial hypertension. However, in the clinical practice, there are people who do not respond to treatment and evidence a recurrence of vascular events.

Objective:

To evaluate the response of hypertensive patients to antiplatelet drugs.

Material and Methods:

Cross-sectional, observational, descriptive and comparative study that included 299 subjects with arterial hypertension and 96 non-hypertensive subjects (control group) who were taking antiplatelet drugs. The hypertensive subjects were grouped according to the consumption of antihypertensive drugs. Platelet aggregation collagen in platelet-rich plasma was determined using the turbidimetric Born's method. The response to the antiplatelet therapy was classified in four categories (good, moderate, poor and non-responsiveness) in accordance with the platelet aggregation.

Results:

There was a slightly better response to antiplatelet drugs, although it was not statistically significant in hypertensive subjects without antihypertensive drugs (35,7 % good and 42,9% moderate) in relation to hypertensive subjects who were taking antihypertensive drugs (32,7 % good and 26,5 % moderate) and the non-hypertensive ones (30,2 % good and 30,2 % moderate).Besides, it was found that 17,7 % of non-hypertensive subjects and 14,3 % of the hypertensive ones without antihypertensive drugs and 13,2 % of hypertensive subjects with antihypertensive drugs were not responding to the treatment with antiplatelet drugs.

Conclusions:

The response of hypertensive patients to antiplatelet drugs, either taking antihypertensive drugs or not, is heterogeneous and similar to the response of the non-hypertensive subjects.

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