7 November 2011

Blood pressure drugs may offer benefits in valvular heart disease

Drugs used to treat blood pressure could offer benefits to patients with a leaking heart valve, new research at the University of Dundee and NHS Tayside has revealed.

Aortic regurgitation is the term given to a condition where the main valve between the heart and the rest of the body leaks. Patients are often asymptomatic but when the leak becomes significant the heart can struggle and patients may experience breathlessness.

The mainstay of treatment is surgery to replace the valve. For patients who have no symptoms and whose hearts appear to be coping with the leak it had not been known whether offering other treatments such as drugs called ACE Inhibitors or angiotensin blockers, commonly used to treat blood pressure, may offer benefit, or indeed may delay the need for an operation.

Chim Lang, Professor of Cardiology at the University of Dundee, and his team studied the records of Tayside patients with aortic regurgitation who have undergone heart scans over the last 20 years in Tayside.

'From looking back at records for these individuals, we have shown that patients taking drugs that block the renin angiotensin system like ACE Inhibitors and angiotensin blockers had significantly lower rates of all-cause death and hospitalisations,' said Professor Lang.

'We observed that patients with aortic regurgitation who were taking these medications had a better outcome. This observation, however, needs to be confirmed by prospective clinical trials.'

Details of the research are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The research team utilised the unique resources of the Health Informatics Centre at the University of Dundee to link anonymous data on patients having heart scans to prescription records, hospital admission and test data as well as data from the general registry office.

The study was kindly funded by the charity TENOVUS.

For media enquiries contact:
Roddy Isles
Head, Press Office
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384910
E-MAIL: r.isles@dundee.ac.uk
MOBILE: 07800 581902