Painkillers ‘upping male blood pressure’

Some of the most commonly-used pain relieving drugs could be responsible for raising blood pressure in men, a new study has claimed.

The US-based research says that analgesics can potentially increase the risk of hypertension by up to 38 per cent.

Previous studies have indicated that painkillers could lead to raised blood pressure in women, but the Harvard Medical School report studied 16,031 male health professionals in order to address the gender-research imbalance.

Publishing their findings in the Archives of Internal Medicine, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama), researchers evaluated participants – whose average age was 67 – in 2000 and two years later to gauge their blood pressure and painkiller use.

Almost 2,000 test subjects developed hypertension in the subsequent four years.

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which include ibuprofen and naproxen, were found to raise the risk of increased blood pressure by 38 per cent, while Acetaminophen and aspirin upped the likelihood of hypertension by 34 per cent and 26 per cent respectively.

Lead author John Forman writes that the data adds “further support to the hypothesis that non-narcotic analgesics independently elevate the risk of hypertension”.

“Given their common consumption and the high prevalence of hypertension, our results may have substantial public health implications and suggest that these agents be used with greater caution,” he concludes.