Newer drugs may cut stroke, heart attack risk

Patients with high blood pressure taking a combination of newer drugs may cut their risk of Stroke by 25 percent and dangerous heart complications by 15 percent compared with those on older pills, according to a large study released on Tuesday.

The advantage is so dramatic that many patients on the older regime of a beta-blocker drug and a diuretic should halt their treatment and begin taking the newer combination, which includes Pfizer Inc.'s drug Norvasc and CV Therapeutics' Aceon, researchers said.

The 20,000-person, Pfizer-funded study was halted early, last November, after researchers found the drugs were so much better than conventional treatment with a beta-blocker and a diuretic. Full results were presented at the American College of Cardiology meeting in Orlando, Florida, which ends on March 9.

The newer drugs are Norvasc, known generically as amlodipine, a calcium channel blocker and perindopril, an ACE inhibitor, sold by CV Therapeutics and Solvay Pharmaceuticals as Aceon.

They were tested in the study against AstraZeneca's atenolol, a beta-blocker that has been off patent for several years, and a diuretic pill.

Beta-blockers are mostly off patent and sold generically, and have been standard therapy for high blood pressure, chest pain and heart failure for years.

The study also found "a substantial excess" of new diabetes cases among those in the beta-blocker and diuretic group.

"This has been reported in quite a few studies now. It's clear that patients on any regime containing a beta blocker and even worse, if it also contains a diuretic, are 30 percent more likely to develop diabetes," said Peter Sever of Imperial College, London, who led the presentation.

Another part of the study stopped prematurely in October 2002 after it showed patients with high blood pressure benefited from taking Pfizer's cholesterol drug Lipitor. Pfizer has combined Norvasc and Lipitor into a drug called Caduet, which generated sales of $50 million in 2004, the year it was approved. Norvasc had sales of $4.5 billion.

Lipitor is used for those who have abnormally high cholesterol levels. When taken together with a low-fat diet, this medicine can effectively reduce LDL cholesterol, commonly referred to as the "bad" cholesterol, triglyceride levels, and total cholesterol, while increasing the HDL, or "good" cholesterol.

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