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'via Blog this'This study, in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, was the first to systematically document the risk. It focused on much more commonly used erythromycin pills — usually sold as a generic — along with certain medicines for infections and calcium channel blockers for high blood pressure.
Dangerous combinations Ray said the danger seems to come from other drugs slowing the breakdown of erythromycin, which increases its concentration. At high levels it traps salt inside resting heart muscle cells, prolonging the time until the next heartbeat starts, and sometimes triggering an abnormal, potentially fatal, rhythm.
The findings show doctors should choose an alternative antibiotic, Ray said, at least when prescribing the drugs that interact. Amoxicillin, another popular antibiotic, showed no cardiac risk.
“There are other antibiotics that provide the same antimicrobial activity without building up in the blood the way erythromycin does,” Ray said.
Ray’s team of doctors and nurses spent years studying detailed medical records of 4,404 Medicaid patients from Tennessee who apparently died of cardiac arrest from 1988-93. The team confirmed 1,476 cases of cardiac arrest, then studied Medicaid’s records of each patient’s medication use.
Only a small number of patients had taken both erythromycin and any of the antibiotics or heart drugs carrying a risk.
Still, three of them died. Statistically, it was extremely unlikely those deaths were due to chance, according to Ray and other experts.
(It's weird how such a small amount of death is labeled probable cause and yet everything with vaccines is considered "coincidence.")
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