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Our cardiac meds – in real life, not just in studies

If you – like me – have had a heart attack, you are now likely taking a fistful of medications each morning, everything from anti-platelet drugs to help prevent a new blockage from forming inside your metal stent to meds that can help lower your blood pressure. All of these cardiac drugs have been studied by researchers before being approved by government regulators as being safe and effective for us to take every day.

But one particular study on this subject published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology raised a unique point:

“Little is known about the benefits and risks of longterm use of cardiovascular drugs. Clinical trials rarely go beyond a few years…

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Featured

  AI to help find new heart drugs

As part of the new collaboration, researchers will draw on data from UK Biobank, a national health resource containing a wealth of information on 500,000 people in the UK. The data available will enable researchers to discover pathways involved in heart disease that could provide new targets for treatment.

  Why We Should Test Heart Drugs On a ‘Virtual Human’ Instead of Animals

Thousands of animals are used for heart drug tests each year—but research shows that computer-simulated trials are more accurate.

Articles of Interest

The Biggest ‘Drug’ to Reverse or Prevent Heart Disease Isn’t a Medication

The current way doctors treat heart disease is misguided because they treat the risk factors not the causes. To think we can treat heart disease by lowering cholesterol, lowering blood pressure and lowering blood sugar with medication is like mopping up the floor while the sink overflows.

3D Heart Simulation Predicts How Drugs Will Affect Your Heartbeat

Your heart might “skip a beat” if you’re frightened or you suddenly see a long-lost love, but in real life, an irregular heartbeat can be dangerous. If the heart can't pump enough blood to the body, it could result in organ failure or stroke. And certain prescription drugs may throw off the natural rhythm of your heart if not properly vetted.

Can This Drug Cure Performance Anxiety?

Beta-blockers, used primarily as a treatment for heart disease, may help calm the nerves of anxious orators.

Cardiologists Worry As Heart Drug Research Loses Steam

The hunt for new heart drugs is losing momentum as resources are switched to other areas, notably cancer research, where investors get a better bang for their buck.

Gender differences in the effects of cardiovascular drugs

This review briefly summarizes gender differences in the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of cardiovascular drugs and provides recommendations to close the gaps in our understanding of sex-specific differences in drug efficacy and safety.

Heart Drugs: Too Many Medication Types Are Compromising Health, Doctors Say

Many drugs are prescribed widely, even though evidence they actually work is weak...

It's Not Dementia, It's Your Heart Medication: Cholesterol Drugs and Memory

Why cholesterol drugs might affect memory.

These Beating Mini-Hearts Could Save Big Bucks—And Maybe Lives

Pharmaceutical firms typically spend billions of dollars and a decade to successfully bring a new medicine to market. Drugs are often felled by harmful side effects that don’t get detected until costly human trials—and the heart is the number one place where things can go wrong. So drugmakers have been looking for ways to identify cardiac issues sooner rather than later.

Tomorrow’s Heart Drugs Might Target Gut Microbes

If your cholesterol levels are high, your doctor might prescribe you a statin, a drug that blocks one of the enzymes involved in creating cholesterol. But in the future, she might also prescribe a second drug that technically doesn’t target your body at all. Instead, it would manipulate the microbes in your gut.

Viagra’s famously surprising origin story is actually a pretty common way to find new drugs

Despite the drug’s popularity today, the researchers who discovered it weren’t even looking for it. Sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, was originally developed to treat cardiovascular problems. It was meant to dilate the heart’s blood vessels by blocking a particular protein called PDE-5. In animal tests, it seemed to work moderately well: researchers could find evidence that it was impeding PDE-5, and the animals weren’t having any obvious negative side effects.

Resources

6 Medications For Your Heart—Simplified

Discover the drug that's right for you.

Cardiac Medications

There are many types and combinations of drugs used to treat coronary artery disease (CAD), and your doctor will decide the best treatment combination for your situation. The following chart gives you a quick "at-a-glance" look at many typical cardiac medications. Your prescription may have a different name from the ones listed on this chart. Brand names commonly available in the U.S. are shown in parentheses after the generic name for each drug.

Emergency cardiac drugs: Essential facts for med-surg nurses

This article helps nurses who don’t work in ICUs or EDs to understand emergency drugs and their use.

Medications & Heart Health

For patients with cardiovascular disease, taking medication is usually a long-term commitment, perhaps lifelong. Therefore, understanding the medications you are taking and how they work is a key step in managing your cardiovascular disease and preventing a first, or repeat, cardiovascular event. In fact, for many patients, not adhering to a medication plan can have serious, or even fatal, consequences.

Drugs.com

The following drugs and medications are in some way related to, or used in the treatment of Heart Disease. This service should be used as a supplement to, and NOT a substitute for, the expertise, skill, knowledge and judgment of healthcare practitioners.