Blood pressure drugs useful for breathing problem

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Treatment with blood pressure drugs called beta-blockers appears to improve the severity of central sleep apnea in patients with chronic heart failure, according to study findings reported in the journal Chest.

Central sleep apnea involves periods when an individual stops breathing during sleep, which is caused by a failure of the brain to send appropriate signals to the breathing muscles.

The authors note that up to 50 percent of patients with the most common type of heart failure have central sleep apnea. The current findings are based on study of 45 patients with chronic heart failure, of whom 27 were taking the beta-blocker carvedilol and 18 who were not.

Treatment with carvedilol (Coreg) appeared to improve the severity of sleep apnea, report Dr. Akira Tamura and colleagues, from Oita University in Japan. Moreover, the improvement was directly related to the dose of carvedilol.

Treatment with carvedilol for 6 months led to significant improvements in sleep apnea for five patients who had severe breathing problems when the study began, the report also shows.

"These results suggest that beta-blocker therapy may...reduce the severity of central sleep apnea in patients with chronic heart failure," the researchers conclude.

SOURCE: Chest, January 2007.