The surprising news made headlines in December 2002. Generic pills for high blood pressure, which had been in use since the 1950s and cost only pennies a day, worked better than newer drugs that were up to 20 times as expensive.
The findings, from one of the biggest clinical trials ever organized by the federal government, promised to save the nation billions of dollars in treating the tens of millions of Americans with hypertension — even if the conclusions did seem to threaten pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer that were making big money on blockbuster hypertension drugs.
Six years later, though, the use of the inexpensive pills, called diuretics, is far smaller than some of the trial's organizers had hoped.
"It should have more than doubled," said Dr. Curt D. Furberg, a public health sciences professor at Wake Forest University who was the first chairman of the steering committee for the study, which was known by the acronym Allhat. "The impact was disappointing."
The percentage of hypertension patients receiving a diuretic rose to around 40 percent in the year after the Allhat results were announced, up from 30 to 35 percent beforehand, according to some studies. But use of diuretics has since stayed at that plateau. And over all, use of newer hypertension drugs has grown faster than the use of diuretics since 2002, according to Medco Health Solutions, a pharmacy benefits manager.
The Allhat experience is worth remembering now, as some policy experts and government officials call for more such studies to directly compare drugs or other treatments, as a way to stem runaway medical costs and improve care.
The aftereffects of the study show how hard it is to change medical practice, even after a government-sanctioned trial costing $130 million produced what appeared to be solid evidence.
A confluence of factors blunted Allhat's impact. One was the simple difficulty of persuading doctors to change their habits. Another was scientific disagreement, as many academic medical experts criticized the trial's design and the government's interpretation of the results.
Moreover, pharmaceutical companies responded by heavily marketing their own expensive hypertension drugs and, in some cases, paying speakers to publicly interpret the Allhat results in ways that made their products look better.
"The pharmaceutical industry ganged up and attacked, discredited the findings," Dr. Furberg said. He eventually resigned in frustration as chairman of the study's steering committee, the expert group that continues to oversee analysis of data from the trial. One member of that committee received more than $200,000 from Pfizer, largely in speaking fees, the year after the Allhat results were released.
There was another factor: medicine moves on. Even before Allhat was finished, and certainly since then, new drugs appeared. Others, meanwhile, became available as generics, reducing the cost advantage of the diuretics. And many doctors have shifted to using two or more drugs together, helped by pharmaceutical companies that offer combination pills containing two medicines.
So Allhat's main query — which drug to use first — became "an outdated question that doesn't have huge relevance to the majority of people's clinical practices," said Dr. John M. Flack, the chairman of medicine at Wayne State University, who was not involved in the study and has consulted for some drug makers.
Dr. Sean Tunis, a former chief medical officer for Medicare, remains an advocate for comparative-effectiveness studies. But, as Allhat showed, "they are hard to do, expensive to do and provoke a lot of political pushback," said Dr. Tunis, who now runs the nonprofit Center for Medical Technology Policy, which tries to arrange such trials.
"There's a lot of magical thinking," he said, "that it will all be science and won't be politics."
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