Safety of Hypertensive Drug Questioned

B O S T O N, Aug. 29 -- A new round of conflicting studies is once again fueling debate among hypertension experts and creating confusion among the millions of patients wondering whether the medication they are taking for high blood pressure is actually reducing their risk of having a heart attack.

A study today from the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Amsterdam shows calcium channel blockers, one class of hypertension medication, may increase the risk of heart attacks and heart failure compared to other high blood pressure drugs. The report comes just days after research presented at another scientific meeting in Chicago reached an opposite conclusion.

For the 24 million Americans who take these drugs, the arguments among scientists still have not answered the question: What drug should I take?

Diagnosis: High Blood Pressure High blood pressure, or hypertension, which affects one out of every four Americans, occurs when the blood presses too hard against the walls of the arteries, damaging blood vessels and possibly leading to heart attacks or strokes.

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Medications to treat hypertension include these calcium channel blockers, such as Pfizer’s Norvasc and Procardia, as well as ACE-inhibitors, beta-blockers and diuretics. The drugs bring blood pressure down to a normal range using different mechanisms, such as relaxing the artery muscles or reducing the amount of fluid in the arteries.

The researchers decided to look at the safety of long-acting calcium channel blockers after having revealed five years ago that the shorter-acting ones posed significant risk. Today, few doctors prescribe these shorter-acting drugs.

In the latest study announced in Europe, the researchers, led by Dr. Marco Pahor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., combined nine previously-conducted smaller studies, in what is called a meta-analysis of collected data from the medical literature, to reach a large pool of more than 27,000 patients. He worked with investigators at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and the University of Washington in Seattle.