For people with high blood pressure, taking antihypertensive drugs can reduce their chances of heart attack and stroke but the medications pose a hidden risk for older patients. The drugs can cause dizziness and fainting that can sometimes lead to falls and hip fractures.
Physicians have long understood the danger but a new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine is the first to show that antihypertensive drug use poses a rapid rise in the short-term risk of hip fractures. Other studies had focused on long exposure periods.
Dr. Debra A. Butt of Ellesmere Health Care Center and colleagues followed a cohort of over 300,000 newly treated hypertensive patients aged 66 and older from April 2000 to March 2009. They found the risk of hip fractures increased 43 percent in the first 45 days of taking antihypertensive drugs. Caution is advised when initiating antihypertensive drugs in the elderly," they wrote.
Perhaps the advice should be more focused, suggests ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava. Both patients and their caregivers or companions should be made aware of these risks so that they can take the appropriate precautions, since these fractures are likely the result of falls caused by the lowered blood pressure from the new treatment.