Effect of Diuretic Therapy on Ventricular Arrhythmias in Hypertensive Patients with or without Left Ventricular Hypertrophy

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, some researchers began to question the use of certain diuretics as antihypertensive agents, reasoning that they could cause hypokalemia and therefore increasing the likelihood of cardiac arrhythmias. For this study, Freis's team focused on hypertensive patients with evidence of left ventricular hypertrophy to determine if they had an increased risk of sudden death when treated with diuretics. They found that therapy with the thiazide diuretic did not increase the ventricular arrhythmias in these patients.