Saturday, November 25, 2017

Redefined Blood Pressure

American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC) published the new guidelines related to high blood pressure. According to this guidelines, high blood pressure should be cured before lifestyle changes and some diseased patients with drug therapy at 130/80 mm Hg in place of 140/90 mm Hg. These guidelines published regarding the detection, management treatment and prevention of high blood pressure.


Leading American Heart Association experts issued new guidelines for High blood pressure that means tens of millions more will meet the criteria for the condition, and will need to change their life styles or takes medication therapy to treat it.
Under the guidelines, formulated by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the number of men under age 45 with a diagnosis of high blood pressure will triple, and the prevalence among women under the age 45 will double. Dr. Robert M Carey who is the co-chair of the committee that wrote the new guidelines said "Those numbers are scary".
The number of adults with high blood pressure, or hypertension, in the US will rise to 103 million from 72 million under the previous standard. But the number of new candidates for drug treatment will rise only by an estimated 4.2 million.
Now, high blood pressure will be defined as 130/80 milimeters of mercury or greater for anyone with a significant risk of heart attack or stroke. Recent research indicates this is true even among older people for whom intensive treatment had been thought too risky.


Medicinal Chemistry: A Drug Design Perspectives

Medicinal chemistry is the scientific discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacy that deals with the design, identification, synthesis and development of new molecular entities for therapeutic use. The main aim of medicinal chemistry is the design, discover and development of new compounds that becomes as a drug for therapeutic use. This process involves a team of workers from a wide range of disciplines such as biology, chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, medicine, mathematics and computing, amongst others. Medicinal chemistry also involves the isolation of compounds from natural sources. 
The discovery or design of a new drug not only requires a discovery or design process but also the synthesis of the drug, a method of drug administration, the development of tests and procedures to establish how it operates in the body and a safety assessment. Drug discovery may also require fundamental research into the biological and chemical nature of the diseased state. These and other aspects of drug design and discovery require input from specialists in many other fields and so medicinal chemists need to have an outline knowledge of the relevant aspects of these fields. 

What are Drugs ?

Drugs are mainly defined as chemical substances that are used to cure or prevent diseases in humans, animals and plants. The activity of a drug is its pharmaceutical effect on the subject, for example, analgesic or b-blocker, whereas its potency is the quantitative nature of that effect. Unfortunately the term drug is also used by the media and the general public to describe the substances taken for their psychotic rather than medicinal effects. However, this does not mean that these substances cannot be used as drugs. Heroin, for example, is a very effective painkiller and is used as such in the form of diamorphine in terminal cancer cases.


Drug Action-

The action of drugs and the sites at which they are believed to act are extremely varied. Common target sites are the cell envelopes and walls of microorganisms, enzymes, receptors, nucleic acids and viruses. 
Read next article for the structures and  action of  drugs that target these sites. It also covers the  some of the general strategies adopted to discover new leads for some of these targets.

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