December 5th, 2008
Turns out my doctor goofed
As regular readers know I have hypertension. I got it from my father. My hobby is passing it on to my kids.
Lately it has gotten worse, so my doctor added a diuretic to my regular ACE Inhibitor.
Oops. (This sculpture, called Valentine, sits on the downtown square of Decatur, Georgia, a block from my doctor’s office.)
A study dubbed Accelerate, conducted at the University of Michigan with 11,506 patients,whose results were published in yesterday’s New England Journal of Medicine, shows that adding a calcium channel blocker instead works a bit better.
During the 36 months of the study, those who added the calcium channel blocker to their ACE inhibitor suffered 552 “primary outcome events” (heart attacks, strokes, bypass surgeries, etc.) while those with the diuretic suffered 679.
You can look at this one of two ways.
- Just 11.8% of those on the diuretic had a life-threatening emergency against 9.6% on the more complex medicine.
- Or your risk on the diuretic was 19% higher, since the first number is 19% bigger than the second.
Either way those results flipped the switch on the study, which was ended early because the numbers were deemed conclusive.
Should I be angry with my doctor? No, of course not. This is what studies like this are for, to evaluate two worthy treatments and see which works better with a lot of people.
But I’ve got a two-month supply of these diuretic-laced tablets, at about $1 per tablet, and after I finish them she and I are going to have a nice chat.
Oh, while many journalists were quick to point out that this study was funded by Novartis, they make both the ACE-diuretic combo I have been taking and the ACE-calcium combo shown to work better.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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