The potential benefits of taking medications to lower high blood pressure may not outweigh their negative effects on quality of life for some patients, reports a study funded in part by the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Health Care Policy and Research.
Side effects of these medications include fatigue, weakness, headaches, joint and stomach aches, nausea, impotence and urinary tract problems. Often, the reduction in blood pressure with these medications was not significant for some patients despite the numerous side effects caused by the drugs.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison interviewed 1,430 randomly selected adults 45 to 89 years old. They obtained medical histories and measured the subjects’ health status using a variety of measures and self reports. The individuals with high blood pressure taking the medications scored lowered on their “overall health” than those with high blood pressure not on the medications.
A highly popular blood pressure medication may be responsible for an excessive number of heart attacks and cases of heart failure.” High blood pressure drugs know as calcium blockers have shown that they do not prevent the cardiovascular complications of high blood pressure.
Use of any of the long-acting calcium channel blockers leads to about 40,000 "unnecessary or excess" heart attacks in the U.S. each year and about 85,000 "excess events" worldwide, Marco Pahor, MD, tells WebMD. Pahor, a professor of medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., headed the team of researchers who wrote the study. You may recognise some of the names of these drugs: Procardia XL, Norvasc CD, and Adalat CC. They found that people on these drugs experience a “27% increase in heart attacks and a 26% increase in congestive heart failure.”
Sources: “Health status and hypertension: A population-based study,” William F Lawrence, M. D. Dennis Fryback, Ph.D., and others Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, Nov. 1996
“Popular Blood Pressure Medicine May Do More Harm Than Good,” WebMD Medical News 8/29/00
For more health tips visit www.BTHWellnessCenter.com
No comments:
Post a Comment