Dr. Juan José Beunza. PHOTO: Manuel Castells

Frequent consumption of analgesics can increase the risk of arterial hypertension among healthy individuals. This is one of the conclusions reached by the study carried out by Dr. Juan José Beunza within the project Seguimiento Universidad de Navarra (SUN), at partnership with the American universities of Harvard and Minnesota (USA).

Their research, developed during a postdoctoral stay at Harvard University thanks to a scholarship grant from the La Caixa Foundation, was aimed at goal to evaluate the influence of the habitual consumption of aspirin and other analgesics on the development of arterial hypertension among healthy subjects.

To this end, 9,986 Spanish university graduates were followed for four years. "Then," explains the author, "we took into account their medical diagnosis of arterial hypertension, adjusted the analysis to avoid the distortion of other factors and concluded that the frequent use of aspirin -two or more days per week- increased the risk of suffering from this condition by 1.45 times. In the case of other analgesics, the increase was 1.69 times."

According to Dr. Beunza, physicians already know that nonsteroidal analgesics can cause hypertension in patients with renal failure, "the novelty of this study is that it adds evidence on the association between the habitual intake of analgesics and the manifestation of arterial hypertension in healthy subjects," he explains.
 

Always follow your physician's instructions

Juan José Beunza, professor at School of Medicine, emphasizes that this is a prospective study (longitudinal, which allows the incidence of the problem to be analyzed both in the past and in the future), on healthy subjects and with great statistical power: "All this corrects some of the limitations of other projects -scarce issue of participants and short follow-up time, etc.-, as well as confirming, for the first time in a European population, the findings found in programs of study of American cohorts".

Regarding analgesic consumption habits among the healthy population, Dr. Beunza advises always following your doctor's instructions. "The general public, moreover, should know that it is very likely that the benefit of aspirin or other analgesics clearly outweighs the risks." "In this sense," he adds, "physicians are also now aware that the regular intake of analgesics is associated with an increased risk of hypertension, so they can take this into account when prescribing their consumption".

Interview with Dr. Beunza on 98.3 Radio: