The Mended Hearts, Inc.
Hearts of Jersey Chapter #179

August 2009

The Cochrane Reviews

One of the studies we considered for the “Heart News and Notes” section was a Cochrane Review that concluded that lowering blood pressure below 140/90, the standard criterion for hypertension, was not associated with any significant benefit, either in all-cause mortality or in the incidence of heart disease, stroke or kidney disease.

Since people are now encouraged to be concerned about blood pressure above 120/80, called prehypertension, this is a surprising result, suggesting a need for more study. But apart from our surprise, we wondered: what is a Cochrane Review?

Our search led to the website of the Cochrane Collaboration: http://www.cochrane.org. It told us that the Cochrane Collaboration is a global network of volunteers dedicated to improving health care through systematic reviews of the effects of interventions, with the intent of furthering “evidence-based medicine.” Their results are published in the Cochrane Library.

What’s the Cochrane Library? A link on cochrane.org took us to a page on the website of the publishing company Wiley Interscience, which hosts the Cochrane Library online.

According to Wikipedia - an online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to - the Cochrane Library is a collection of healthcare databases provided by the Cochrane Collaboration and other organizations, the core of which is the Cochrane reviews.

Full access is by subscription, and many countries (but not the U.S.) have made it available free to all residents. However, summaries of the reviews are available free of charge.