Urgent: Widely used antibiotics could put you at risk of sudden death

It can be the most serious health emergency of your life.

Without medical help, you’ll be dead in two hours. Even if you get to a good hospital on time, your chances of survival are still only 50-50.

I’m talking about when an aneurysm on your aorta — the main artery in your body — ruptures.

This deadly condition used to be extremely rare. But now reports of both aortic ruptures and a tear in the aortic wall itself (called aortic dissection) are on the rise.

And researchers in Taiwan may have just discovered why.

It turns out some of the most widely used classes of antibiotics on the market — drugs I’ve warned you about before — could be leaving you with one of these ticking time bombs in your arteries.

Even years after you’ve stopped taking the meds.

Double the troubleI’m sure you remember when TV funnyman John Ritter died suddenly in 2003.

He was just 54.

Ritter had an aortic aneurysm, which is a bulge or weakness in the main artery that takes blood from the heart to the rest of the body.

And if it bursts, as it did with Ritter, you’re in big trouble.

But it looks like you don’t need to have a history of arterial disease for one of these life-threatening aneurysms to develop. You can just be one of the millions of Americans who have taken a popular antibiotic to treat everything from bronchitis to a hangnail.

You see, researchers at the National Taiwan University Hospital found that patients who had taken fluoroquinolones (or FQs) antibiotics in the past 60 days had double the chance of having an aortic aneurysm or a sudden tear in an artery wall.

Double.

And FQs are the most frequently prescribed antibiotics in the U.S., so this new study should be an urgent wakeup call for all of us. (The FQs you’re probably most familiar with are Levaquin and Cipro, but read to the end for a more complete list.)

That risk would be bad enough if these drugs were only used in the most serious of cases — like treating bubonic plague. But as I’ve been telling you for years, doctors hand them out like candy for sinus infections and UTIs that could be treated with far safer antibiotics or without drugs at all.

Even worse, the researchers said that while the danger is highest for those who had taken FQs recently, any past use still ups your chances of a rupture or tear.

That means that even if it’s been years since you last took one of these FQs, you could still be facing a deadly risk that neither you nor your doctor know about.

Now, the drug companies and our government are acting like this latest research is some sort of earth-shattering surprise — but they shouldn’t be.

Just seven years ago, the FDA added a black box warning to FQs warning that they can cause tendon damage, such as ruptures and tendinitis.

But here’s the problem — the same collagen that makes up your tendons is also a major component of your aortic wall.

In other words, Cipro or Levaquin can trigger an aortic aneurism or an artery tear in the same way that they can cause a tendon to rupture.

And even when these dangerous drugs spare your life, they find plenty of other ways to make you miserable.

Last month I told you about a secret document on FQs that the FDA had been hiding from us for several years. One that told how its own staff had documented the dangers of peripheral neuropathy — that pain and tingling you can get in your hands and feet — in people of all ages.

FQ drug users have also been reporting hallucinations, disorientation and violent reactions after taking these meds. Not to mention those disabling tendon ruptures, the ones the FDA finally got around to warning us about.

If you’re taking FQs now — or have in the past — researchers are advising that your doctor screen you for aneurysms.

And when it comes to getting screened for an aneurysm, you can’t be too careful. Because by the time one of these things ruptures, it may already be too late.

FQ drugs include: Cipro, Levaquin, Avelox, Noroxin, Floxin and Factive. And they can be either swallowed or injected.

Sources:
“Fluoroquinolones may increase aortic aneurysm risk” Salynn Boyles, Medpage Today, medpagetoday.com

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-Emily