In a small London study, a blood-pressure drug still helped after patients stopped

A small follow-up of 14 patients found that a drug called baxdrostat lowered blood pressure in a hormonal form of hypertension, and that the benefit was still there up to two years after the pills stopped. The Guardian reported on November 8, 2026, that the work was led by Morris Brown, a hypertension specialist at Queen Mary University of London, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The patients had improved during a three-month trial, kept taking a daily dose for six to 12 months, and then stopped. When doctors checked later, blood pressure was still lower. Brown said just under a quarter had come off all treatment and had normal readings.

The condition is primary aldosteronism, in which small nodules on the adrenal glands make too much of a hormone that tells the kidneys to hold salt. It accounts for about 5 to 10 percent of high blood pressure. Surgery to remove a gland is the usual treatment and does not always finish the job. Baxdrostat blocks the enzyme that makes the hormone. It was approved in the United States earlier this year for hypertension that other drugs do not control, and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is considering it for the NHS. Mason Freeman of Harvard, who worked on the study, said it is too early to call anyone cured and that a larger trial is under way to test whether the effect lasts. The news is these 14 patients. It is not a cure, and survival was not the measure.