Popular heartburn medications like Nexium, Prilosec or Prevacid may increase your risk of early death when taken for extended periods, a new study suggests.
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Further, the longer you take these drugs, known as proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), the greater your risk of early death, said senior researcher Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly.[break]
He is a kidney specialist and assistant professor of medicine with the Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis.
"There was a relationship between duration of use and risk of death," Al-Aly said. "More prolonged use was associated with even higher risk."
That said, Al-Aly pointed out that some patients really do need to take PPIs to deal with medical issues, even long-term.
"Proton pump inhibitors actually save lives," Al-Aly said. "We don't want to leave people with a scary message. If you need this drug and you're under guidance of a doctor, you should continue to take your medication until otherwise advised."
The study found that people taking PPIs for a year or more had a 51 percent increased risk of premature death, compared with 31 percent for people on the drugs for six months to a year, and 17 percent for three- to six-month users.
Short-term use of PPIs - up to 90 days - did not appear to affect death risk, the findings showed.
Proton pump inhibitors work by blocking the enzyme system that produces stomach acid. PPIs have become one of the most commonly used classes of drugs in the United States, with 15 million monthly prescriptions in 2015 for Nexium alone, the researchers said.
However, concerns about the drugs' safety have been growing in recent years, as studies have linked PPIs to kidney disease, heart disease, pneumonia, bone fractures and dementia.
To take a broad look at PPIs and whether they increase a person's chances of premature death, Al-Aly and his colleagues compared the medical records of nearly 276,000 users of PPIs against those of about 73,000 people who took another class of heartburn drug called H2 blockers.
Overall, PPI users have a 25 percent increased risk of premature death compared with people taking H2 blockers (such as Pepcid or Zantac), the investigators found.
The researchers calculated that for every 500 people taking PPIs for a year, there is one extra death that would not have occurred otherwise, Al-Aly said. ■