Postoperative hypertension can cause serious complications, including bleeding from fresh anastomoses, cardiovascular accident, and myocardial ischemia. Therefore rapid control of blood pressure is essential to prevent poor outcome. In this study, 30 American Society of Anesthesiologists class I and II patients who did not have cardiac surgery and subsequently developed postoperative hypertension were randomly assigned to receive either nicardipine, a new dihydropyridine calcium channel blocker, or placebo. Intravenous nicardipine was given as a loading bolus of 10 mg/hr for 5 minutes and was titrated to 15 mg/hr if needed to achieve a therapeutic response. After therapeutic response, intravenous nicardipine was decreased to 3 mg/hr and subsequently titrated in increments of 1.0 to 2.5 mg/hr to maintain blood pressure control. Systolic and diastolic blood pressures during titration and maintenance did not differ significantly from preoperative levels in patients treated with nicardipine. The mean time to therapeutic response for the nicardipine-treated group was 8.67 +/- 1.46 minutes, and the median time to offset of action was 15 minutes. Eleven of the 12 patients who received placebo were crossed over to antihypertensive therapy, and of these, 10 received intravenous nicardipine. In this group all achieved therapeutic response in 7.3 +/- 1.18 minutes. The usefulness of intravenous nicardipine for postoperative hypertension was demonstrated in this study by: (1) the rapid control of blood pressure, (2) its continued efficacy during maintenance, and (3) little need to adjust dosage to control blood pressure.