Professor Chris Bulpitt, from Imperial College Department of Care of the Elderly, collected the award this month at the conference of the Society for Clinical Trials in Atlanta, Georgia. The trial was judged to be the clinical trial most likely to improve the lot of mankind and provide the basis for a substantial and beneficial change in health care.

The same trial also picked up the award for Trial of the Year by Medscape.

When results of the trial were published in 2007, the steering committee of HYVET (hypertension in the very elderly trial) had already accepted the recommendation from its Data Safety Monitoring Board that the trial should be terminated early because the group of patients receiving blood pressure-lowering medication had a significant overall reduction in mortality in comparison with the control group.

Professor Bulpitt said: “It was not clear prior to our study whether the over-80s would benefit from blood pressure-lowering medication in the same way as younger people. Our results are great news for people in this age group because they suggest that where they have high blood pressure, such treatment can cut their chances of dying as well as stroke”.

By Georgina Lavender