Are you being prescribed the ‘medicine from hell’?

The fact that there are now a lot of new and highly risky meds on the market doesn’t mean that the old ones are any safer.

In fact, one that’s been around in one form or another for 200 years is starting to look more and more like something that should have been buried a long time ago.

I last warned you about the dangers of digoxin a few months back. At that time, I described the horrifying results of a two-year Kaiser Permanente study of 15,000 people diagnosed with A-fib but with otherwise fairly healthy hearts.

The upshot was that those who were prescribed digoxin upped their risk of dying by a whopping 71 percent. They were also 63 percent more likely to land in the hospital than the group not taking the drug.

And those results were in line with what previous research had concluded about this drug, which one A-fib expert had called “the medicine from hell.”

But the bad news just keeps getting worse.

The latest came in the form of an analysis of 19 digoxin studies done since 1993 that was published online this month in the European Heart Journal. It found that A-fib patients who took the drug dramatically increased their risk of dying during just a two-and-a-half-year period. Patients in a smaller group who took it for congestive heart failure, or CHF, also were more likely to die than those who didn’t.

The results led senior author Dr. Stefan Hohnloser to recommend that doctors “better think twice before prescribing digoxin.” The drug, he said, can cause arrhythmias and interact with other medications.

It also has what researchers call a “narrow therapeutic window,” which means it’s easy to take a dose that could be toxic – or even fatal.

Hohnloser pointed out that therapy for CHF and other heart conditions has “dramatically changed,” but digoxin is still widely used. In fact, it’s still given to 20 to 30 of patients with A-fib.

However, he warned that patients should consult with their cardiologists before they stop taking it.

So if you suffer from either A-fib or CHF, you might want to check what that Rx bottle contains. And if the label says it’s digoxin, schedule a chat with your doctor.

Ask him to start you on some type of therapy with a better safety record than a “medicine from hell” that has no place in modern heart treatment.

Sources:

“More digoxin cautions: Use in AF, heart failure raises mortality in meta-analysis” Marlene Busko, May 13, 2015, Medscape, medscape.com