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November 1, 2010 -- 5:30pm EDT Did I (Cough!) Say ACE Inhibitors? (Cough! Cough!) It is a provocative article because of the word "deceptive" in the title: the word indicates that patients and physicians are not being adequately informed about the incidence of a side effect of ACE inhibitors: the cough. And is that ever the case! The PDR and FDA labeling of the ACE inhibitor enalapril states that coughing has been reported as a side effect approximately 1.3% of the time. So your chances of getting a cough due to this drug are slightly higher than 1 in 100. So would you believe it's more than ten times that: almost 12 in 100? That's what this study shows. By doing a meta-analysis of 125 studies of ACE inhibitors that constituted 198,130 patients, the authors discovered that:
What this means is that when patients find they have this problem (coughing) and they call their doctors, they're told it might be a side effect of the drug, but that it only happens in 1 out of 100 patients. In reality, this study is saying that it is 1 out of 10: that this side effect of coughing is vastly under-reported. Anecdotally, if you search Angioplasty.Org for "ACE inhibitors cough" (hint: select "find all words") you will see how many patients have posted to our Forum with coughs. By the way, our Patient Forums get almost 40,000 pages accesses a month.) I understand the patient perspective on this; a number of years ago I was prescribed an ACE inhibitor -- and I developed a terrible cough. I had no idea what was going on, until I researched this side effect on "the inter-webs". |
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A
study in the current issue of The American Journal of Medicine confirms
what we've been telling heart patients on