The article is a correspondence from the authors responding to an analysis of their review on heart attack and stroke prevention. The authors drew on two main sources – the seminal work of Malcolm Law and his colleagues Nicholas J Waldo and Joan K Morris, which demonstrated the importance of comprehensive and systematic reviews. They based their paper on randomized evidence from the past two decades. The aim of the authors was to make this knowledge available to the wider public through a calculator for calculating the effectiveness of high blood pressure treatment. The article thus represents an attempt to simplify and improve the approach to the prevention of these serious cardiovascular diseases based on the latest scientific knowledge.