If you’ve got hypertension and take nifedipine to treat your high blood pressure or angina, it’s important that you know researchers may have found a cause for concern. Nifedipine, a dihydropyridine used to treat angina and high blood pressure, has been found to increase the risk of cardiac arrest.
Are hypertension drugs safe?
In the new study, researchers used data from the Dutch Amsterdam Resuscitation Studies Registry and the Danish Cardiac Arrest Registry to look at the medical history of 10,000 people taking two types of dihydropyridines, as well as 50,000 controls.
The research focused on nifedipine and another dihydropyridine, amlodipine, the latter of which created no increased risks for cardiac arrest.
But the scientists found that people who took high doses of the nifedipine were at a significantly greater risk to have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest compared to the controls or those taking amlodipine.
So, why would the two dihydropyridines have different effects on cardiac risk? It appears that nifedipine significantly shortened the “action potential”—that is, the change in the charge of a membrane linked to the transmission of an impulse. This change could possibly cause arrhythmias, which can lead to cardiac arrests.
Until now, both types of dihydropyridines were considered to be equally safe and effective at treating hypertension. With the results of this study being presented at the annual congress of the European Heart Rhythm Association in 2019, it’s been decided that more research needs to be done to ensure the safety of the hypertension drug.
Cardiac arrest in the United States
Each year, approximately 475,000 people die from cardiac arrest in the U.S., according to the American Heart Association. Cardiac arrest kills more than prostate cancer, pneumonia, firearms, HIV, car accidents, house fires, breast cancer, influenza and colorectal cancer COMBINED.
When the heart stops pumping blood through the body, the person can die within minutes if they don’t receive treatment. Because cardiac arrest is both common and serious, it’s vital that more research be done on hypertension drugs that may increase the risk factor for cardiac arrest.
