Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Some anti-acid meds may reduce Plavix efficacy

From CTV News:
Patients who are prescribed popular blood-thinning drug to prevent a heart attack while at the same time take certain anti-acid medications may actually boost their risk of having a heart attack, a new study suggests.

Canadian researchers have found that heart attack patients who take the blood-thinning drug clopidogrel (Plavix) have a 40 per cent greater risk of suffering another heart attack if they are also taking one of a number of proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs).

PPIs block the production of stomach acid and are used to treat conditions such as ulcers and acid reflux disease.

The PPIs linked to the increased heart attack risk are: omeprazole (Losec), lansoprazole (Prevacid) and rabeprazole (Pariet).

The researchers, who hail from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) in Toronto, say that they did not find an increased heart attack risk among patients taking the PPI pantoprazole (Pantoloc). They also did not find an increased risk among patients taking anti-acid medications known as H2 receptor antagonists, such as Pepcid or Zantac. ...more

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