Doctors usually prescribe high doses of beta blockers after a heart attack. However, a low dose would bring more benefits.
Heart patients treated with a low dose of beta blockers are more likely to survive a myocardial infarction than those given a high dose, reveals a large study published this Monday in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
This work, carried out by researchers at Northwestern University (Illinois, United States), was based on health data from 6,680 patients who had suffered a heart attack. Following this event, 90% received beta blockers, a class of drugs prescribed to prevent recurrence.
Not all of the patients included in the study received the same doses of medication for various reasons. The authors explain that some patients did not tolerate high doses well, for others the dosage was not yet adjusted.
Surprising results
“We wanted to see if prescribing the doses used in clinical trials to patients was more effective,” said Dr. Jeffrey Goldberger, professor of cardiology at Northwestern University School of Medicine and responsible for this work. We expected that patients treated with low doses of beta blockers would have a lower survival rate than other patients. We were very surprised to find that they survived this long, if not longer ”.
In fact, the results show that patients receiving a quarter of the maximum recommended dose have a 20-25% higher survival rate than patients receiving the highest doses.
Customize treatments
“There is probably no single effective dose for all patients. Indeed, it does not make sense that the same dose works for a fragile 80-year-old man who had a heart attack without serious consequences and a robust 40-year-old man who suffered from a severe myocardial infarction ”, comments the searcher.
This work thus underlines the need to determine the optimal dose of beta-blockers according to the patient. “A fact that no one has considered in recent decades,” notes Dr Jeffrey Goldberger. Additional clinical studies will therefore have to be carried out in order to confirm these results.
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