Forty-four placebo-resistant patients (mean age: 59.2 +/- 2.1 years; mean weight: 70.14 +/- 1.95 kg: mean supine diastolic pressure: 101.6 +/- 0.70 mmHg) were treated during 8 weeks (D0-D56) with a single 1 mg tablet of rilmenidine taken every morning. The patients were seen at intervals of 14 days until their diastolic pressure returned to a normal value of 90 mmHg. Once this goal was achieved, they were not seen again until D56. The actuarial survival curve enabled us to evaluate, at a given moment, the cumulative number of normalized patients and the accuracy of this evaluation (confidence interval). After two weeks of rilmenidine treatment, 66 percent of the patients were normalized. The cumulative proportion of normalized patients increased with time, from 80 percent at D28 to 85 percent at D42 and 98 percent at D56. Confidence intervals were relatively small. Although these results were much better than those obtained in previous studies of this drug, our study shows that blood pressure was rapidly normalized in the majority of hypertensive patients by a daily 1 mg dose of rilmenidine and that doubling this dosage after two weeks of treatment is not necessarily justified, since the percentage of normalized patients increases up to 98 percent after eight weeks of treatment. The small number of adverse effects and the good patient's compliance with treatment (evaluated by tablet counts and rilmenidine plasma level values) testify that this drug respects the quality of life.