Posts Tagged “Aleve”

Jun 03 2006

Ibuprofen and heart attack risks

Perhaps Vioxx and Celebrex and the Cox-2 inhibitors are not the culprit. There is an important report from England that is saying that using Ibuprofen as an arthritis pain killer will raise your heart attack risk as much as Vioxx or Celebrex.

High doses of older painkiller drugs may pose the same cardiac risk as newer medications such as
Vioxx and other cox-2 inhibitor drugs, according to a British study that looked at what is regarded as the best evidence from randomized, controlled trials.

Data from 138 such trials with 140,000 participants showed a 42 percent increased risk of serious blood vessel problems such as heart attack and stroke in those taking selective cox-2 inhibitors, the chemical class that includes Vioxx ,
Bextra and Celebrex. Cox-2 inhibitors belong to a broader class of pain relievers called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which also include non-cox-2 medications such as ibuprofen, diclofenac, naproxen and aspirin.

And the study — which was funded by various U.K. public-sector medical groups — also found a similar increase in cardiac risk for other NSAIDs, said Dr. Colin Baigent, a reader in clinical epidemiology at the University of Oxford and an author of the report in the June 3 issue of the British Medical Journal.

Specifically, long-term use of high-dose (800 milligrams three times per day) ibuprofen was associated with a 51 percent higher risk for “vascular events” compared to placebo, while long-term use of high-dose (75 milligrams two times a day) diclofenac boosted the risk by 63 percent, the U.K. team reported. No such risk was seen with long-term use of naproxen (sold under the brand name Aleve).
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