Common antacids increase heart attack risk up to 21pc

A new study has suggested that heart attack risk increases 16-21 percent with use of common antacids.

Adults who use proton pump inhibitors are between 16 and 21 percent more likely to experience a heart attack than people who don't use the commonly prescribed antacid drugs, as per Houston Methodist and Stanford University scientists.

An examination of 16 million clinical documents representing 2.9 million patients also showed that patients who use a different type of antacid drug called an H2 blocker have no increased heart attack risk.

Senior author John Cooke said that the earlier work identified that the PPIs can adversely affect the endothelium, the Teflon-like lining of the blood vessels, which led them to hypothesize that anyone taking PPIs may be at greater risk for heart attack. Accordingly, in two large populations of patients, they asked what happened to people that were on PPIs versus other medications for the stomach.

In the present study, the researchers found a clear and significant association between exposure to PPIs and the occurrences of heart attack.

In the future, the researchers say they hope to conduct a large, prospective, randomized trial to determine whether PPIs are harmful to a broader population of patients.

The study appears in PLOS ONE.