Pills for blood pressure may help to fight heart disorder

PATIENTS with a serious heart disorder could be helped with drugs usually taken to combat high blood pressure, Scottish research suggests.

Aortic stenosis - when the main valve between the heart and the rest of the body becomes narrowed - is one of the most common forms of valve heart disease in the developed world, affecting around 5 per cent of the population and growing.

Now research by the University of Dundee and NHS Tayside has found that by taking blood pressure drugs, patients with the disease could be less likely to suffer heart problems or die.

Patients with aortic stenosis can show no symptoms, but when the valve becomes too tight they often experience chest pain and breathlessness when they are physically active.

The main form of treatment for the disease has been to replace the valve in the heart which is causing the problem.

But for patients who have no symptoms, it has previously not been known whether offering other treatments such as drugs called "ACE inhibitors" or "angiotensin blockers" - commonly used to treat blood pressure - may help them or even delay the need for an operation.

Chim Lang, professor of cardiology at the University of Dundee, and his team studied the records of patients in Tayside with aortic stenosis who have undergone heart scans over the past 20 years.

They used resources from the Health Informatics Centre at the university to link anonymous data on the patients having heart scans to prescription records, hospital admissions and test data as well as data from the general registry office.

The results, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, showed a lower risk of death or suffering a complication such as a heart attack or stroke among those taking blood pressure drugs compared with those who were not.

Prof Lang said: "Aortic stenosis is a growing problem. Physicians have previously not known whether to continue these ACE Inhibitor medications or not.

"On the one hand, a fall in blood pressure may not be helpful, but, on the other hand, these drugs offer many protective benefits.

"We observed that patients with aortic stenosis who were taking these medications had a better outcome. This observation, however, needs to be confirmed by prospective clinical trials."

Experts welcomed the results of the research, funded by medical charity Tenovus, and called for more work to be carried out.

Natasha Stewart, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: "This is an interesting concept that could benefit patients with aortic stenosis.

"However, this was a small study, and the people who benefited the most were those who also had other underlying heart problems or risk factors for heart disease, such as diabetes.

"We'd need to see more research, especially around exactly which patients would benefit, before we could say whether this potential treatment is effective."