Study warns Prevacid may have deadly interaction with antibiotic
If you’re taking the acid-suppressing med Prevacid, there’s an urgent warning you need to know about.
And don’t bother asking your doctor or pharmacist because they likely haven’t heard about it, either.
It took a team of Ivy League researchers who teamed up with a group of journalists — that’s right, not the FDA but newspaper reporters — to uncover some of the deadliest drug interactions out there.
I first warned you about what these scientists discovered early this year. But now, they’ve singled out Prevacid (one of those proton pump inhibitors) and published a study to alert doctors and patients about the risk.
And they warn that this might not be the only such drug you need to worry about.
We can no longer take a “wait and hope approach.”
That’s what data scientist Nicholas Tatonetti, who co-authored the new study, has to say about the risk of taking multiple drugs.
And since one in five Americans are popping three or more meds, and one in ten are taking five or more, you would think that backing Tatonetti’s research would be a top priority with the FDA.
Yeah, you would think.
But so far he’s only been given a warm welcome at the Chicago Tribune, where his method of mining the FDA’s own data has turned up some shocking discoveries.
And one of the most alarming is about what can happen if you’re given a widely-used antibiotic called ceftriaxone and also happen to be taking OTC Prevacid.
First, ceftriaxone, which also goes by the brand name Rocephin, is used to treat a list of conditions as long as your arm. Things such as UTIs, bone and joint infections, meningitis, pneumonia and even ear infections.
Then take Prevacid, something you can buy at just about any supermarket or Walmart, and you’ve got what the researchers call a situation that can have a “profound impact on patient safety.”
What they found is that taking these two meds together can up your risk by 40 percent of triggering a potentially deadly heart rhythm called “QT prolongation.”
If your QT interval increases, you’re in danger of going into a life-threatening arrhythmia. In fact, prolonging the QT interval for only milliseconds can result in sudden death that appears to have no explanation.
This potentially fatal heart danger is so important that for the past 11 years the FDA has required that practically all new drugs be tested for this side effect.
And that’s what makes Professor Tatonetti’s research so important. Instead of isolating these drugs to look for this danger, he combined FDA data with actual EKGs from Columbia University patients.
When Tatonetti’s research first came out, the company that helped bring Prevacid to market, Japanese drugmaker Takeda, said there was nothing showing the med could affect the heart.
But that’s exactly the point! This new research goes way beyond what the FDA requires Big Pharma to do in “proving” a drug is safe.
If you’re taking another brand of one of these PPI acid drugs, such as the “Purple Pill” Nexium or Prilosec, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the clear.
The researchers said that it’s possible other brands might also have serious interactions with certain meds.
And even scarier, they also said that there has been “a large number of deaths reported to the FDA” of patients taking these easy-to-find drugs. Could that be because of this heart interaction they found?
It very well may be.
But what we know for sure is that we know very little about how all these drugs play together. Tatonetti and his team have just scratched the surface.
And his research gives us the best reason of all to take as few drugs — both Rx and OTC — as possible.
Sources:
“Scientists see progress in identifying deadly drug interactions” Sam Roe, October 10, 2016, The Chicago Tribune, chicagotribune.com
