If you have A-fib, beware of this old, familiar heart med
It’s one of the oldest heart drugs on the market, but if you have the common heart rhythm condition atrial fibrillation (A-fib), it could be a death sentence.
I’m talking about digoxin. It’s been prescribed for over 80 years, so you would think doctors would know just about everything there is to know about it by now.
But it seems where digoxin is concerned, more and more risks are being revealed every year.
Now, a new study has confirmed with “strong, comprehensive, and up-to-date evidence” that for A-fib patients, starting up on this drug may kill you long before any heart problems will.
This latest study on digoxin comes from doctors at the Clinical Research Institute at Duke University. They looked at around 18,000 patients with A-fib who were already participating in a large drug trial.
And what the Duke researchers found is that digoxin is incredibly dangerous for anyone with A-fib. So dangerous, in fact, that in announcing the results of the study in a university press release, the word “death” was mentioned all of 18 times – especially as in “increased risk of death” and “sudden death.”
For those with A-fib, starting up on digoxin upped their chances of dying from any cause by a gigantic 78 percent. Plus that, their risk of sudden death was four times higher than that of A-fib patients who didn’t take it.
Dr. Renato Lopes, lead author of the study, said that most of the sudden deaths that occurred in the trial patients happened within six months of starting up on the drug.
But even if you’ve been taking digoxin for a long time, you’re still not out of the woods.
For the A-fib patients who had already been on this med, the researchers found that the concentrations of it in their blood could make the difference between life and death.
For every increase in digoxin of 0.5 nanograms per milliliter, or ng/mL, the risk of dying went up almost 20 percent. For those with the highest blood concentrations, that risk was increased by a whopping 56 percent.
And something that makes these findings even more frightening is that millions have a condition called “silent A-fib,” meaning they can be totally unaware that they even have this erratic heart rhythm disorder.
Of course, if this were all a big surprise, it would be bad enough. But almost two years, ago we told you about another study that sounded a similar warning where digoxin and A-fib are concerned.
That was the one in which researchers from Kaiser Permanente looked at thousands of people with A-fib, some taking the drug and some not, and found those in the digoxin group had a 71 percent higher risk of dying. Those patients were also over 60 percent more likely to land in the hospital.
And two years before that, the Kaiser researchers found that those newly diagnosed with A-fib and put on the drug had double the death rate of those who weren’t taking it.
Other studies have had similar findings, particularly one out of Sweden ten years ago that discovered patients with A-fib given digoxin were twice as likely to die within a year as those not prescribed the drug.
Now in case you’re wondering why so many A-fib patients are still being given an Rx for digoxin despite all these frightening findings, one reason could be that current guidelines followed by many cardiologists amazingly still list the med as a treatment option!
That’s why if you’re taking any drugs for your heart, it’s time to do a check and find out if digoxin is one of them. And if so, make an appointment with your doctor as soon as possible to discuss other treatment options, whether you have A-fib or not.
Just because digoxin is as old as the hills doesn’t make it any safer than a drug that’s just come on the market.
“New study adds to concerns about heightened risk of death for AFib patients taking digoxin” American College of Cardiology, March 19, 2017, acc.org
