United States: According to a new study, recreational drug users are three times more prone to have recurrent heart-related emergencies as compared to others who don’t use them.
More about the finding
Dr. Raphael Mirailles, who is a researcher and a physician at the Hospital Lariboisiere in Paris, explained that around eleven percent of the patients admitted to intensive cardiac care units have been consuming recreational drugs.
Mirailles said, overall, “recreational drug use was associated with a tripling of the risk of a repeat serious cardiovascular event within one year,” as US News reported.
Details of the study
A study by researchers examined almost one thousand four hundred patients who were admitted to Intensive Cardiac Care Unites (ICCUs) in thirty-nine hospitals across France for a two-week time span in 2021.
The participants were screened for drug usage with the help of urine tests. Around 11 percent of them had been consuming cannabis, opioids, cocaine, amphetamines, or MDMA, as per the study results.
The patients were followed up for a full year and noted their health status, such as cardiac health, heart attack, or stroke vulnerability, as experts revealed, as US News reported.
The results showed that almost seven percent of the patients had faced another serious heart emergency.
About the usage of the drug
As per the expert’s report, the MDMA drug is found to be mostly associated with heart-related risks, where users tend to be four times more vulnerable to heart diseases later in life.
Additionally, heroin and other opioids raise the risk by 3.6 percent, and cannabis by 1.8 times.
Researchers will present the findings on Wednesday at the European Society of Cardiology’s annual meeting in London.
According to Mirailles, current guidelines do not ask for regular drug screening for patients who are in need of intensive care.
Moreover, these results urge for “systemic screening should be considered in intensive care,” he added.