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For years, physicians happen to be telling their sufferers to watch the amount of sodium in their food due to the potential damage it may cause towards the body’s cardiovascular system. Now, new research from UK researchers published in the British Medical Journal has found that some common medications contain enough sodium to improve the chance of an unsafe cardiovascular event.
The researchers figured the public “ought to be warned concerning the potential risks of high sodium intake from prescribed medicines” and these drugs “ought to be prescribed with caution only when the perceived benefits outweigh the potential risks.”
“These medicine is available too over the counter, they may be picked up within the supermarket,” study author Jacob George, a clinical pharmacologist at Dundee University?told The Guardian. “We have no treatments for how many huge numbers of people are buying these drugs.”
“Those we looked at were prescribed by GPs, but there’s a potentially much larger trouble with these drugs being bought over-the-counter as well as in supermarkets,” added George.
Many drugs use sodium like a non-active ingredient to improve the absorption of the active ingredient in to the body. These medications are often the soluble or effervescent versions of the drug. They called for medications containing excessively high amounts of sodium to be labeled as such.
The study team began by collecting a list of 24 drugs that tend to be relatively full of sodium, including effervescent or soluble versions from the pain medications acetaminophen and aspirin, as well as calcium and zinc supplements.
Next, the study team sifted through a database of British medical records that included nearly 1.3 million patients’ medical history to have an average length of slightly more than seven years. They said their focus ended up being to determine whether people on high-sodium drugs were more or less prone to have cardiovascular episodes compared to those who didn’t take these drugs.
The researchers found that over 61,000 patients they were following a break down stroke, heart attack or death due to vascular disease. To get rid of confounding factors of these events, the researchers considered patients’ body mass index, smoking habits, alcohol consumption, history of chronic illnesses, and employ of certain other drugs.
The research team figured patients taking high-sodium medications were built with a 16 percent higher risk of a cardiac arrest, stroke or vascular death compared to patients using the non-sodium versions of the same drugs. The scientists also found that patients on high-sodium medications were seven times more?likely to build up high blood pressure. Overall death rates, driven usually by coronary disease, were also 28 percent higher within this group.
“You should keep in mind that this research pertains to people who are taking these medicines regularly,” Mike Knapton, from the British Heart Foundation, told The Guardian. “This does not mean that occasional use could damage your heart health. To give us a concept of whether these risks translate for medicines bought over the counter, we would need to see further research focusing on non-prescription medicine.”
“It’s important not to simply stop taking your dose,” Knapton added. “Make an appointment together with your doctor to go over any concerns.”
