Data Dive Suggests Link Between Heartburn Drugs And Heart Attacks - Richard Harris

Researchers at Stanford University gathered about 3 million electronic medical records — with patients' names and other identifying material stripped away — to look for a link between a popular heartburn drug and heart attacks.

The drugs in question are called proton-pump inhibitors, and include Prilosec, Nexium and Prevacid. These PPIs are among the most popular medicines in the world, with sales of $14 billion a year. Roughly 20 million Americans now take the drugs for heartburn, and several versions are sold over the counter.

The researchers had conducted some laboratory work suggesting that PPIs could affect heart tissue. So Nigam Shah, an assistant professor of medicine and biomedical informatics, and his colleagues dived into the electronic medical records compiled by Stanford and a private company to see whether people who took these drugs were also at higher risk of having a heart attack.

They report in the journal PLOS One that they did indeed find a modest correlation. "The increase in risk is about 16 to 20 percent, depending on the particular drug involved," Shah says.

Assuming that link holds up, and the risk is spread evenly throughout the population, someone with a low risk of heart attack doesn't have much to worry about. "If your risk of a cardiovascular event or a heart attack is one in a million, now it is 1.2 in a million," Shah says.

But he's more concerned about people who have a higher risk of a heart attack. Since millions of people take these medications, even a low added risk for an individual can translate to quite a few people across the population.

"I wouldn't want the public to panic and to say we should stop taking these drugs," Shah says. But he does recommend that people taking these drugs talk to their doctors to see if they are at greater than average risk for having a heart attack. "And if your baseline risk is high, then maybe you want to take something else."

The study did not find a link between heart attacks and another popular family of heartburn drugs, called H2 blockers (such as Tagamet, Pepcid and Zantac).

But other scientists aren't ready to recommend the switch to those drugs, which are considered to be somewhat less effective for many people with serious heartburn. The correlation Shah has turned up in his data might stem from other factors.  Read More at NPR

Data Dive Suggests Link Between Heartburn Drugs And Heart Attacks