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Viagra and High Blood Pressure
August 03, 2006
It's the little blue pill we all know about. Now
researchers think Viagra may help
heart problems caused by high blood pressure.
Billie Marie Evans hopes so. For 49 years of marriage
she took care of the housework. Now that she has congestive heart
failure, her husband does most of it.
"I depend on him for a lot. It makes me feel bad in a way,"
Evans said.
Billie Marie's heart has thickened due to high
blood pressure putting too much stress on her heart. The condition
is called cardiac hypertrophy.
She took part in a study of 33 volunteers at Johns
Hopkins. Doctors studied her and healthy patients to determine the
heart benefits of Viagra.
"It's an unusual new discovery, initially
coming out of left field," Dr. David Kass, of Johns Hopkins
University, said.
Researchers found the enzyme that Viagra blocks
helps reduce the effects of stress on the heart.
"If you push your foot on the accelerator
pedal without Viagra you're
suddenly going 100 miles per hour and with Viagra you're only able
to go 35 miles per hour, so it's blocking the adrenaline stress
on the heart," Kass said.
"As somebody who sees a lot of patients and
has a lot of options for treating it, I don't think there would
be a place for it right now, it's too preliminary," Dr. David
Eisenberg said.
While the Director of Cardiology Services at Providence
St. Joseph Medical Center would not recommend Viagra to treat cardiac
hypertrophy patients, right now, he says the findings could be beneficial.
"It would be great because it doesn't dilate
arteries and a lot of the medicines that we use to treat heart disease
dilate arteries and try to slow the heart down and it did that in
those 33 volunteers," Eisenberg said.
Tests in mice showed dramatic results. Hearts enlarged
by stress stayed normal when Viagra was used. The first round of
tests on healthy patients showed promise. Viagra reduced stress
on their hearts by half. While critics say there are already various
drugs available to manage cardiac hypertrophy, Dr. Cass predicts
Viagra could someday be used as a standard treatment.
Which is great news for patients like Billie Marie,
even if it comes from an unlikely source.
"If that would help, yeah I'm willing to try
it," Evans said.
For more information, go to: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=health&id=4429467
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