According to a recent study, a drug commonly used to treat high blood pressure and chest pain may increase the risk of sudden cardiac arrest. The study examined the effects of the drugs, nifedipine, and amlodipine, dihydropyridines widely used for high blood pressure and angina, are linked with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The nifedipine doses most often used and studied in this investigation are 30 milligrammes (mg) and 60 mg and the amlodipine doses are 5 mg and 10 mg.
The usual procedure with these is to start with a lower dose and then give a higher dose if blood pressure or chest pain haven’t sufficiently reduced. The findings need to be replicated in other studies before action should be taken by doctors or patients,” said Hanno Tan, a cardiologist at the Academic Medical Centre in the Netherlands.
The study findings said current use of high-dose (60 mg/day), but not low-dose (less than 60 mg/day), nifedipine was significantly associated with an increased risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest compared to non-use of dihydropyridine
A possible explanation of why this discovery has only been made now is that out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is very difficult to study due to its rapid course, and requires dedicated datasets collected specifically for this purpose.
