Calcium-channel blockers for lowering blood pressure cause breast cancer. Older women who take the drugs long-term are nearly three times more likely to develop a tumour.
The risk seems to develop in women who take the drugs for 10 years or longer. There was no risk with the other antihypertensives, such as ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitors, beta blockers and diuretics. The channel-blockers seem to cause cancer by interfering with the process of cell death, or apoptosis.
The drugs are some of the most commonly-prescribed antihypertensives; around 98 million prescriptions for the drugs are written out every year in the USA alone. Researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer research Centre discovered the link after they reviewed the health of 1,763 women aged between 55 and 74 who had developed breast cancer and compared them to 880 cancer-free women.
(Source: JAMA Internal Medicine, 2013; doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.9071)
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