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Heart attack patients are taking beta blockers unnecessarily even though they provide no clear benefit, a landmark trial has concluded.
Daily tablets, which can cause fatigue, nausea and even sexual dysfunction, are offered to most heart attack patients.
Around 60,000 people are prescribed beta blockers each year in the UK and many will continue to take them for life.
But one trial has found that, in about half of patients, they do not reduce the risk of death or new heart attacks.
Beta blockers remain a standard treatment offered to NHS heart attack patients (file image)
Around 60,000 people are prescribed beta-blockers each year in the UK and many will continue taking the pills for life (file image)
Experts say the findings will change the way heart attack patients are treated on the NHS, freeing tens of thousands of uncomfortable side effects.
Dr Malcolm Finlay, consultant cardiologist at Barts Heart Center in London, said: “Beta-blockers remain a standard treatment for almost everyone who suffers a heart attack on the NHS.”
“If we could safely take patients off the medication, thousands of people would avoid side effects.”
When beta blockers were first administered in the 1960s, they were considered one of the most effective ways to ensure that patients did not have another attack.
The tablets block the effects of hormones such as adrenaline, which are known to increase heart rate and blood pressure. This reduces the workload on the heart, helping the organ recover after the stress of an attack.
However, more effective treatments for heart attacks have arrived in the past three decades, including coronary angioplasty, which involves surgically inserting a balloon into the blocked artery to reopen it. This is usually followed by the insertion of a stent, a small mesh tube that keeps the artery open.
Despite these advances, beta blockers remain a standard treatment offered to NHS heart attack patients.
Groundbreaking findings that pills are ineffective for many people were announced yesterday at the American College of Cardiology in Atlanta, Georgia. The trial of 5,000 patients with recent heart attacks in 45 countries concluded that the only patients who can benefit from beta blockers are those with heart failure, an incurable condition that causes the heart to stop pumping effectively.
However, only about 50 percent of heart attack patients have this condition.
Dr. Troels Yndigegn, an interventional cardiologist at Lund University in Sweden and an author of the study, said: “For patients without signs of heart failure, this trial establishes that there is no indication that routine use of beta-blockers is beneficial.”
Beta blockers are used to treat a number of other health conditions, including angina (chest pain caused by narrowing of the arteries that supply blood to the heart) and atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat.
There is no indication that the pills are ineffective treatments for these other heart conditions.