Blood pressure drugs may raise cancer risk
POSTED June 18, 2010 - 16:03 | POSTED BY Jyoti Pal
Last edited by Harpreet Bhagrath on June 18, 2010 - 16:16
These pills, technically known as angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs), work by blocking angiotensin II, a hormone that boosts blood pressure.
However, till date, no major safety concerns linked with taking ARBs have been reported or documented.
The latest study, conducted by U.S. researchers, establishes a higher risk of lethal cancers in patients who received ARB over a four-year period vis-à-vis their counterparts who received a placebo during the same time.
"The increased risk of new cancer occurrence is modest but significant," opined Dr. Ilke Sipahi, lead author of the study, and colleagues from Case Western Reserve University.
Majority of the patients (86 percent) in the study took German drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim's telmisartan, known as Micardis.
The drug manufacturer, however, defended its product and said that "internal safety data analysis of primary data contradicts the conclusions" of an augmented cancer risk.
Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, termed the findings as "disturbing and provocative, raising crucial drug safety questions for practitioners and the regulatory community."
Details of the study
For the purpose of the study, the researchers did a meta-analysis by collating all publicly available data from randomized trials of ARBs that had been published.
In all, they examined the records of over 2, 00,000 patients from various trials. The researchers looked at new cancer data in five trials involving 61,590 patients, and common types of cancers like lung, prostate and breast cancer in another five trials comprising of 68,402 patients.
The researchers also examined cancer deaths in eight trials involving 93,515 patients.
Findings of the study
The findings revealed that patients who took the blood pressure drugs had a 7.2 percent risk of contracting a new cancer vis-à-vis 6 percent risk for patients in the control groups.
The study, due to paucity of data and the limited time frame in which it was conducted, could not establish if these drugs increased the risk of death from cancer.
"At the moment there isn't enough evidence to draw any firm conclusions about how blood pressure drugs might affect cancer risk and this will need further investigation," Martin Ledwick, head information nurse at Cancer Research UK, said.
The findings of the study have been published online in The Lancet Oncology.
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