Common heart medicine may be causing depression

All patients who have had a heart attack are typically treated using beta blockers, but it turns out these drugs are unlikely to be needed for those patients who have a normal pumping ability. What’s more, there is also a risk that these patients will become depressed by the treatment.

Beta blockers are drugs that block the effects of adrenaline on the heart and have been used for decades as a basic treatment for all heart attack patients. In recent years, their importance has started to be questioned as new, successful treatments have begun to be developed. This is mainly the case for heart attack patients whose heart has a normal pumping function even after the attack, meaning they do not suffer from heart failure.

Researchers at Uppsala University wanted to look at the side effects of beta blockers; that is, whether they affect anxiety and depression levels. This is because older research and clinical experience suggests that beta blockers are linked to negative side effects such as depression, difficulty sleeping and nightmares.

Earlier this year, the results of a major study published in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that those who received beta-blocking drugs were not protected from relapse or death compared to those who did not receive the drug. The Uppsala researchers based their work on this study, conducting a sub-study which ran from 2018 to 2023.

The study involved 806 patients who had had a heart attack but no problems with heart failure — half were given beta blockers and the other half were not. About 100 of the patients receiving beta blockers had been taking them since before the study, and the researchers observed more severe symptoms of depression in them. Their findings were published in the European Heart Journal. Acute Cardiovascular Care.

“We found that beta blockers led to slightly higher levels of depression symptoms in patients who had had a heart attack but were not suffering from heart failure,” said doctoral student Philip Leissner, the study’s first author. “At the same time, beta blockers have no life-sustaining function for this group of patients.

“Most doctors used to give beta blockers even to patients without heart failure, but as the evidence in favour of doing so is no longer so strong, this should be reconsidered,” Leissner continued. “We could see that some of these patients appear to be more at risk of depression. If the drug doesn’t make a difference to their heart, then they are taking it unnecessarily and at risk of becoming depressed.”

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