While a diabetes drug was recently found to help prevent heart attack and stroke, it is the other way around for a different type of medicine. Drugs against high blood pressure may not always be beneficial, as such medicines may pose heart attack risks to patients with diabetes.
Diabetic patients almost always have high blood pressure, too. This is the reason why most of them are also recommended to undergo antihypertensive treatments that are far more intense than non-diabetics.
A new study, however, suggests that administering blood pressure drugs to diabetics may not always be a good idea.
Study author Mattias Brunström from Umeå University says their study exhibits that intense therapies to lower blood pressure using antihypertensives may be hazardous for diabetic patients whose systolic blood pressure is less than 140 mm Hg.
Antihypertensives: Not For All
The authors reviewed published studies and unpublished patient records to determine the effects of antihypertensives in individuals with diabetes.
All in all, the study included 49 trials with a total of 73,738 subjects, of whom majority were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
The findings showed that the range of the patients' pre-treatment blood pressure dictates the impacts of antihypertensive drugs. For example, patients with systolic blood pressure of 140 mm Hg were linked with decreased risk of heart attack, stroke and death.
Conversely, for patients with a systolic blood pressure of less than 140 mm Hg, the risk of death due to cardiovascular disease rose.
The results were noted in type 2 diabetes patients and therefore cannot conclude the effects on those with type 1 diabetes.
"The results are important both conceptually for research on hypertension and for clinicians," the authors write.
The Right Use Of Antihypertensives
The study does not only point out to the importance of monitoring overtreatment, but it also signifies how vital it is to look at the blood pressure treatment as a whole.
Brunström says international and Swedish guidelines may be formulated in the next years. He and his colleagues are hoping their study would provide value and influence to these future protocols.
The study was published in The BMJ on Thursday, Feb. 25.
