Word: calcium
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Many patients suffering from high blood pressure were probably surprised last week to hear that one of the most popular class of drugs for treating their condition--calcium channel blockers--was being blamed for some 85,000 avoidable heart attacks and heart failures a year. Their doctors were less likely to be surprised. They know that treating hypertension can be tricky and that these particular drugs have been under intense scrutiny for the past five years...
...Calcium channel blockers were introduced 20 years ago to great fanfare in part because the science seemed so easy to follow. The drugs work by blocking calcium from initiating muscle contractions in the heart and the walls of blood vessels. This allows blood vessels to relax, reducing blood pressure. More than 28 million people, including 12.7 million in the U.S., take the drugs under a variety of brand names, from Adalat to Verelan...
...change after last week's report, delivered at a meeting of the European Cardiology Society in Amsterdam. Researchers reviewing studies involving 27,000 patients in nine clinical trials found that the risk of heart attack was 27% greater--and the risk of heart failure 26% greater--among users of calcium channel blockers than among patients taking other hypertension drugs...
...earlier this year showed that they significantly increase the risk of heart attacks, and many physicians began changing their patients' prescriptions. Doctors then as now warned that dropping any blood-pressure medication can be dangerous, and should be done only under a doctor's careful supervision. One of the calcium blocker manufacturers believes clinical decisions should not be based on this type of study alone...
...venom purchased from Kristensen in the 1980s, for example, helped neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas of New York University School of Medicine discover a new calcium channel involved in the communication between certain neurons, shedding new light on how the mind works. Another toxin extracted from Spider Pharm venom in 1995 by Kenton Swartz at the National Institutes of Health (named hanatoxin after Swartz's daughter) is being used to probe the function of proteins that are located on cellular membranes and have been implicated in diseases ranging from diabetes to epilepsy...