Morphine and Cardiac Disease

http://news.scotsman.com/health.cfm?id=496882005

HEART attack patients given morphine to relieve chest pain have an almost 50 per cent higher risk of dying than those who are not, according to new US research.

Doctors at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in North Carolina are advising cardiologists to treat pain with nitroglycerin before resorting to morphine.

The researchers analysed the data for more than 57,000 high-risk heart-attack patients, 29.8 per cent of whom received morphine within 24 hours of hospitalisation. Those had a 6.8 per cent death rate, compared to 3.8 percent for those receiving nitroglycerin, even adjusting for the patients’ baseline clinical risk.

"Nitroglycerin has a physiological effect that may, at least temporarily, influence the underlying ischemia," says Duke cardiologist Trip Meine, who is calling for a randomised clinical trial in the area. "Morphine, on the other hand, doesn’t do anything about what is actually causing the pain. It just masks it, and may, in fact, make the underlying disease worse. Morphine has the potentially harmful side effects of depressing respiration, reducing blood pressure and slowing heart-rate. These side-effects could explain the worse outcomes in patients whose heart function has already been compromised by disease." For more details, visit www.dukehealth.org.

TRANSCENDENTAL meditation (TM) may help adults with high blood pressure live longer, as well as reduce stress.

US doctors have analysed data from two studies which show that TM helped decrease blood pressure among 202 male and female adults with an average age of 72. All had pre-hypertension or mild hypertension.

They found that, overall, men and women who practised TM not only had lower blood pressures than those in other groups, but were 30 per cent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 49 per cent less likely to die from cancer.

TM editation is a technique for calming the body and mind, allowing individuals to enter a state of "restful alertness", in which the body is awake, but the mind is not engaged in conscious thought.

Robert Schneider, of the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, the author of the study, describes it as a method of "waking up the body’s own self-repair mechanisms".

Dr Schneider adds: "There are many non-drug techniques for reducing blood pressure, but none ... extend life."

 

and to think that when I was misdiagnosed last year they gave me a morphine drip.