A new study questions the practice of giving heart-healthy patients blood pressure drugs before surgeries that do not involve the heart.
While patients with three or four heart risk factors should still be given beta-blockers before an operation, people with no risk for heart disease shouldn’t get the medications because it might lower the odds of a good outcome, the researchers reported.
Previously these drugs were thought to protect the heart during an operation, but their ability to lower blood pressure caused some patients without heart risk factors to develop dangerously low blood pressure and die from strokes, said lead researcher Dr. Mark Friedell, chairman of the department of surgery at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.