Common heart treatment fails to help - Beta blockers may offer little against heart attack, stroke

ScienceNews ^ | October 2nd, 2012 | Nathan Seppa

[neverdem]

Beta blockers may offer little against heart attack, stroke

Commonly prescribed drugs called beta blockers fail to protect against heart attacks and strokes even while helping to control heart rate and blood pressure, researchers report in the Oct. 3 Journal of the American Medical Association. Beta blockers also didn’t lessen the odds of a heart-related death, in heart attack patients or others at risk, over a median follow-up of 44 months.

The American Heart Association had previously discouraged the long-term use of beta blockers as a post–heart attack treatment beyond three years. The new findings further dim the prospects for drugs that have been a standard treatment for decades.

“I think this study is valid,” says Valentin Fuster, a cardiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York who wasn’t involved in the new study. Once seen as a leading treatment for heart attack patients, beta blockers are losing their luster thanks to new drugs and surgical devices, he says. When beta blockers were introduced several decades ago, statin drugs for lowering cholesterol and mesh stents for propping arteries open were unavailable.

Many patients in the new study — getting beta blockers or not — were also on other drugs. “The original beta blocker trials didn’t have all these medications and interventions,” Fuster says. “Therefore, [beta blockers] were the big winners.” The relative ineffectiveness of beta blockers in the new study reflects these other advances, he says.

Early studies had suggested that beta blockers prevented heart attacks, but many of those were short-term analyses, says study coauthor Sripal Bangalore, an interventional cardiologist at the New York University School of Medicine. He and an international team examined a registry of thousands of patients with either a history of heart attack, coronary artery disease or cardiac risk factors...

[neverdem]

β-Blocker Use and Clinical Outcomes in Stable Outpatients With and Without Coronary Artery Disease

[txrefugee]

Expect more of these common treatments to disappear under ObamaCare. After all, the sooner you die, the better the system will work. That is a sure fire way to cut the cost of medical care.

In the future, you may see this headline: Study Shows Appendectomies Unnecessary

[catnipman]

Beta blockers are horrible drugs. Originally the only treatment for BP, three much better classes of BP drugs have come along, with the ARBs being the best of the lot right now.

Naturally, BB makers have been searching high and low for excuses for doctors to keep prescribing these wretched drugs, and had somehow convinced cardiologists that they would extend lives if given on a long-term basis after heart attacks.

I flat out refused to take them after a “mild” heart attack as my cardiologists could make no compelling argument as to why I should take them, merely claiming that some “studies” showed better longevity, though no one knew the mechanism why BBs might improve longevity. Now it looks like that was bogus all along, just as I suspected.

I was well aware that these BBs turn you into a zombie by limiting your heart rate and I just said no. There are a few minor uses where BBs are still useful, mostly in end-stage conditions, but I urge everyone to refuse to take BBs unless there is an urgent, compelling reason to do so.