[Target population for hypertensive therapy].

The efficacy of treatment may be demonstrated globally but, in some patients, treatment can be either inappropriate or harmful because of undesirable secondary effects. Ideally, treatment should be limited to patients who respond, but this is impossible with the published data from clinical trials. This could become possible by creating a data base containing all published results and carrying out meta analyses on individual parameters. Using the most powerful methods of analysis this could allow identification of patients responding to treatment by taking into account not only the benefits but also the risks of a given treatment (the principle is to identify and estimate factors--demographical, sociological, generic, which interfere with the size of the effect). In order to identify responders to antihypertensive treatment, a meta analysis of individual data was started, the INDANA project. With a common data base of all the preventive trials of antihypertensive therapy, this study should contribute to improved identification of responders and therefore to individualization of treatment of hypertension.