|
HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Will Heart Medications Pose Any Risk to Patients? Patients with heart disease are usually prescribed by their doctors with 2 or 3 different medications for prevention of blood clots that are life-threatening. Such combinations of medications could in fact pose some risk to the patients. Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas revealed on June 2, 2009 at the Digestive Disease Week meeting in Chicago that a combination of clot-preventing drugs like aspirin, warfarin or Coumadin and clopidogrel or Plavix can double, triple or even quadruple the risk of stomach or intestinal bleeding in patients with heart disease. These drugs are usually given to prevent the occurrence of second event like heart attack or stroke. According to the researchers, each of these medications has already been known to have a higher risk of causing upper gastrointestinal events, which are defined as ulcers of the stomach or intestines, bleeding or perforations. However, the magnitude of the risk of using these drugs in combination on the gastrointestinal tract still remains unknown. In order to find out the answer, the researchers used national pharmacy data and medical records from the Veterans Affairs Department to identify people aged between 60 and 99 who had been given 4 combinations of clot-preventing drugs. Among the patients, some got aspirin and an antiplatelet drug like Plavix that keeps blood platelets from forming clots, while others got an antiplatelet drug and an anticoagulant such as warfarin that keeps the liver from making certain clotting factors. Meanwhile, some got aspirin and warfarin, and some received all the 3 drugs.
More than 78,000 patients were involved in the study. It was found that 30.4 percent of them were prescribed with some combination of anticlotting drugs, and 1,061 of these had bleeding events that required immediate medical attention within the first year. The study found that there was a stepwise increase when the researchers combined the risk of bleeding from these different combinations. When an anticoagulant was combined with the antiplatelet drug, the risk of a serious bleeding problem within one year was raised by 70 percent, although such combination was proved to be least harmful. A combination of an aspirin and antiplatelet drug doubled, while an aspirin-anticoagulant combination tripled the 1-year bleeding risk. When it came to patients who were prescribed with all 3 drugs, the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding was increased by 4-fold within one year. Triple therapy was most commonly given to younger patients in the study and likely reflected recent changes in cardiac care. It was undeniably that these are significant gastrointestinal bleeding risks, and the findings did suggest the need for a careful balancing of the risks and benefits of these drugs. For patients with heart disease on triple therapy may wish to request their doctor to drop own to a dual or single therapy. There is no doubt that the prescriptions given by the doctors to their patients are healthy for the heart at preventing strokes and heart attacks. Nevertheless, the physicians should now also consider the potential short-term risks of gastrointestinal bleeding versus the potential long-term benefits of being on these protective drugs.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright
2007-2012 © HowToPreventHeartDisease.com . All Rights Reserved.d....... |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
