Painkiller heart attack 'risk'

Research has found that painkillers can increase the chance of heart problems by a small amount for patients on high doses.

Dr Sarah Jarvis told Daybreak that the risks of painkillers is "quite scary stuff, but not panic-able", she added, "at low doses there probably isn't a great risk".

"What we're talking about here is people taking very high doses, 800mg three times a day," she said, "if 300 people took that very high dose for a year, one would have a heart attack who wouldn't have done otherwise".

Lead author Professor Colin Baigent, from University of Oxford, said the risks of taking a higher dose of painkillers are relative to an individual's existing risk of heart disease. He said:

Painkillers have been found to increase the chance of heart problems by a small amount for patients on high doses, research has shown.

Higher dosage of some non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), such as diclofenac and ibuprofen increases the likelihood of having a heart attack or a stroke, researchers from the University of Oxford said.

The research was based on data from outcomes of more than 353,000 patients and focuses on prolonged usage of the drugs in high doses.

The research found that for every 1,000 people with a moderate risk of heart disease allocated to one year of treatment with high-dose diclofenac (150mg daily) or ibuprofen (2400mg daily), about three would experience an avoidable heart attack, of which one would be fatal.