A recent study published in JAMA Neurology shows that angiotensin receptor blockers, a class of blood pressure drugs, reduce the risk of developing epilepsy, especially in older adults and stroke survivors.
Reviewed by Danielle Ellis, B.Sc.Jun 18 2024 A class of drugs already on the market to lower blood pressure appears to reduce adults' risk of developing epilepsy, Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues have discovered. The finding comes from an analysis of the medical records of more than 2 million Americans taking blood pressure medications.
"This is incredibly exciting because we don't currently have any medicines that prevent epilepsy," said Kimford Meador, MD, a professor of neurology and the neurosciences and the senior author of the paper. "I hope these initial findings lead to randomized clinical trials." "This can be a very debilitating disorder, and it's much more common in older adults than people realize," said Meador, a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
In 2022, a study of more than 160,000 people in Germany found that people taking angiotensin receptor blockers, one of the multiple classes of drugs prescribed to treat high blood pressure, had a diminished risk of developing epilepsy. The drugs block certain hormone receptors, lowering blood pressure and decreasing inflammation in blood vessels and other organs -including the brain.
Overall, people taking angiotensin receptor blockers had a 20% to 30% lower risk of developing epilepsy between 2010 and 2017 compared with people taking other blood pressure drugs. This difference held true even when patients with strokes were removed from the analysis, suggesting that the lower rates of epilepsy were not a result solely of a decreased risk of stroke.
Toward clinical trials All blood pressure medications likely have an impact on decreasing epilepsy risk because high blood pressure is a contributing factor to epilepsy. Keeping blood pressure under control through any combination of antihypertensive drugs and lifestyle factors can, therefore, lower a person's chance of developing epilepsy, Meador said.
Blood Pressure Drugs Epilepsy High Blood Pressure Medicine Angiotensin Brain Inflammation Neurology Receptor Research Stroke
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