Serious new warnings issued about a very old drug

If you’ve been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, or A-fib, it’s urgent that you check any medications your doctor has prescribed for you…right now.

Because if the label says “digoxin,” new research has found just how deadly the drug can be for patients with this heart rhythm disorder.

A research team at Kaiser Permanente recently issued additional warnings against using the drug to treat A-fib. They had done a study two years ago on digoxin, and the results were horrifying.

And this new one sounded even louder alarms.

New warnings on a very old drug

The new study, done by head cardiologists and researchers at Kaiser, looked at almost 15,000 people who were recently diagnosed with A-fib, but had not had a heart attack or any history of heart failure. In other words, aside from their A-fib, their hearts were fairly healthy.

Those who took digoxin had a whopping 71 percent higher risk of dying. They were also 63 percent more likely to land in the hospital than the group not taking the drug.

That means you’re actually more likely you’ll die from digoxin than to just be hospitalized because of it!

But even those shocking numbers shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Swedish researchers published a study in 2007 proving that otherwise healthy people given digoxin to treat A-fib were twice as likely to die within a year, compared to those not prescribed the drug.

And two years ago the Kaiser team found that digoxin doubled the death rate of those with A-fib, after following over 23,000 people who were newly diagnosed with the condition.

And just last year more research, the biggest one yet from doctors out of Stanford, followed over 100,000 people with A-fib. And it found those who took digoxin were at least 20 percent more likely to die than the ones receiving other treatments.

And that increase in death was regardless of age or any other drugs they were taking.

Now, digoxin is a very old drug, first mentioned in a medical journal all the way back in the 1700s. And it looks like its age has somehow lent it a kind of “safe halo.”

Clearly it’s anything but.

In fact, one expert in A-fib, who wrote a book on the topic 10 years ago, went so far as to call digoxin “the medicine from hell.”

In addition to A-fib, digoxin is also frequently prescribed for heart failure. Last year over 6.5 million prescriptions were given out for it.

And while the studies I mentioned focused on people with A-fib, it’s obvious from all the recent research that this drug is looking just too risky to take – for any reason.

Source:

“Treating irregular heartbeat with digoxin may come with risks” Robert Preidt, Medline Plus, nlm.nih.gov