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Higher risk with two-drug hypertension therapy:study

Last Updated: 2004-12-14 16:10:32 -0400 (Reuters Health)

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Women treated for high blood pressure with a drug

combination that included a calcium channel blocker had a higher risk of

death than those given other drug therapies, a study said on Tuesday.

The overall risk of heart-related death was low among the more than

30,000 post-menopausal women included in the six-year study, but the

highest mortality rate was among the 1,223 women taking both a calcium

channel blocker and a diuretic.

Thirty-one of the 1,223 women on that drug combination died from

cardiovascular disease, representing an 85-percent higher risk of death

compared to women taking a diuretic and a beta-blocker. Diuretics and

beta-blockers are older classes of hypertension drugs.

Also included in the study were women taking ACE inhibitors, a newer

class of hypertension drugs, which did not carry an elevated mortality

risk when taken in combination with a diuretic.

In many cases, doctors prescribe different classes of blood pressure

drugs in combination, one often a diuretic that increases urine flow and

flushes the system.

A little more than one third of the women in the study were taking a

single drug and their risk of dying from cardiovascular disease was

lower than those taking the diuretic-calcium channel blocker

combination.

" A woman should go to her doctor and ask, why am I on this particular

combination, and is this the best combination for me? " said Sylvia

Wassertheil-Smoller of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, author

of the study in this week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical

Association.

She said two drawbacks to the study were that it was observational, not

controlled, so the drugs were not assigned randomly; and all the

participants were women between 50 and 79 so its conclusions might not

apply to younger patients.

Roughly 50 million Americans have high blood pressure, a condition that

stresses the cardiovascular system and can lead to heart attacks and

strokes.

Last week, another study that examined a calcium channel blocker in

combination with an ACE inhibitor was stopped early because the drugs

offered patients a much better chance of avoiding heart attack and

stroke than older pills. That study was sponsored by drug maker Pfizer

Inc.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, December 15, 2004

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