United States: Beta-blockers may be of no use to people who are heart attack survivors and not heart failure unless a clinical trial shows otherwise.
Researchers questioned the prescription of beta blockers
Through this research, the element of continuous follow-up of beta blockers for all heart attack patients, referred as standard care for decades, was questioned by the researchers.
Some 50 percent of heart attack survivors don’t have heart failure, the form of decline in the pumping ability of the heart, which is characterized by the lack of ability of the heart to pump enough blood out to the body, as was noted by the researchers, as US News reported.
The futility of beta blockers was driven home for these last patients, as they made no difference in heart health or death risk, as shown by the study results.
Dr. Troels Yndigegn, the lead researcher and an interventional cardiologist at Lund University in Sweden, said, “I think that, following this study, many doctors will not find an indication to routinely treat all their patients with beta-blockers following a heart attack,” as US News reported.
Heart failure is regarded as a matter of ejection-fraction, or the ratio of blood pushed out of the heart with each beat. The upper limit of ejection fraction, which stays between 40 to 50 percent, is attributed to the normal condition.
Yndigegn added, “We believe that the evidence still supports beta blockers for patients with a large myocardial infarction [heart attack] that experience heart failure, but for patients with no signs of heart failure and a normal ejection-fraction, this trial establishes that there’s no indication that routine use of beta blockers is beneficial.”
What was the supposed use of Beta-blockers?
Beta-blockers are prescribed for heart patients as they stop hormone release, such as adrenaline, that speed up the heart.
According to US News, many doctors write a beta blocker prescription based on previous knowledge that it may contain capable auto-immune cells, which may prevent a second heart attack.
Yet Yndigegn informed that for the beta blockers they are the sole alpha test candidates too narrow time-period of clinical trials already completed before the beta blockers obtained their routine use vs the mass implantation of the angioplasty and stenting procedures woould change the game for heart block treatment.
However, Yndigegn noted that the clinical trials that led to the routine use of beta-blockers were conducted before the advent of newer procedures -balloon angioplasty and stenting – that are now widely used to reopen blocked arteries.