Health

Magic Bullet For Heart Disease?

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

February 3, 1999 / 5:44 PM EST / CBS

(As reported 2/3/99)
An intriguing study out Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests common antibiotics may be a useful tool in heart attack prevention.

CBS News Correspondent John Roberts reports that the new study presents some of the strongest evidence yet that heart disease may not be so much a consequence of lifestyle as of infection.

"There is a particular germ called chlamydia pneumoniae which has been implicated in some other studies of possibly being causally related to the heart attack," said Dr. Herschel Jick of Boston University Medical Center.

Jick compared 3,000 people who had heart attacks with 13,000 who didn't and found that those who had taken a type of antibiotic called tetracycline were 30 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack. Patients who took the new quinilone antibiotics had their risk reduced by 55 percent.

"Possibly because people receive these drugs and the organism was eradicated, that essentially decreases their risk of subsequent heart attack," Jick said.

Scientists believe the bacteria, which normally causes respiratory infections, gets into the bloodstream and injures the walls of the coronary arteries. In response, the arteries become inflamed and cholesterol, which normally flows freely, becomes stuck to the walls. Eventually, the artery narrows - fertile ground for blood clots and heart attack.

Dr. Elsa Grace Giardina of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York says heart doctors may be on the edge of a revelation similar to the discovery that most stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria.

"Now it's just ordinary to treat peptic ulcer disease with antibiotics. We may end up doing the same thing for coronary artery disease," she said.

But researchers say it's still too early to start prescribing antibiotics to prevent heart disease. And even if the link is conclusively proven, people still need to pay close attention to other risk factors like smoking, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.