Hello, good morning. My name is Dr. Clinton Brown. I’m an associate professor at SUNY Downstate, and I’m here today to talk to you about the importance of treating high cholesterol in our community.

Not too long again, we did a clinical trial in comparing two very important drugs, two statins. One, atorvastatin, and the other rosuvastatin. And we were able to show, in the African American population, that rosuvastatin was actually more effective in lowering cholesterol than atorvastatin.

And I think that this finding is quite new, in that it’s the first group of African Americans that were actually treated with atorvastatin and rosuvastatin comparing the results. It’s important to note that African Americans in general have not been recruited for clinical trials. And so, this trial has a particular importance in that regard.

Another area of importance is hypertension that we see in our community. And we’ve also found that diuretic therapy is extremely important in the first line in treating hypertension. In a recent trial, the ALLHAT trial, we were able to show that the diuretic therapy was as effective as some of the other more popular therapies, such as ACE-inhibitors, calcium channel blockers, and alpha blockers.