Because of the large number of antihypertensive drugs and increasing drug expenditure on hypertension, several countries have conducted economic evaluations on antihypertensive drugs at national level and produced the HTA reports to support the decision-making for an optimal choice, especially for initial drug treatment[63, 223, 246-248]. These studies have generally included an extensive systematic review of existing CEA modelling studies to explore the cost-effectiveness of antihypertensive drugs in primary hypertension. Despite the difference in the depth of search strategy, the included studies (published between 1966 and 2010) overlapped considerably; rather than conducting a new systematic review, this review focused on the included studies in those HTA reports.
