Baseline characteristics of the 65 enrolled subjects in the study are presented in Table 1. Four patients, all from the control group, were lost to follow-up at the treatment period and thus had no outcomes. Three of them had one or fewer visits, explained by the lack of time and refusal to collaborate and an additional patient stopped after three visits since she travelled abroad. The remaining 61 subjects comprised the cohort of ‘compliant patients’ (Figure 1), which is identical with all intent-to-treat patients having outcome measures. The BP changes in response to treatment are shown in Table 2.
The BP reduction in the BIM group was signifi- cantly greater than a predetermined ‘clinically meaningful threshold’ of 10.0, 5.0 and 6.7 mm Hg for the systolic BP, diastolic BP and MAP respect- ively (P � 0.035, P � 0.0002 and P � 0.001).