SALT LAKE CITY — Reassurance about the cardiovascular safety of long-acting β2-agonists in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was provided by a large study presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
Sarika S. Ogale presented a nested case-control study involving 104,459 predominantly elderly male patients with newly diagnosed COPD in the national Department of Veterans Affairs database. During an average follow-up of 1.5 years and a maximum of 5.8 years, 6,954 of the patients were hospitalized for acute coronary syndrome, heart failure, or cardiac arrhythmia. Heart failure was the primary admitting diagnosis in nearly 3,100 patients, with the remainder being split roughly equally between ACS and arrhythmia. The control group consisted of 34,770 VA patients matched for age and duration of COPD.
After adjustment for COPD severity, use of other medications, cardiovascular risk factor profiles, and other factors, the cardiovascular event rate in COPD patients who had ever used long-acting β-agonists (LABAs) proved to be virtually identical to that in never users, according to Ms. Ogale, a graduate student in the pharmaceutical outcomes research program at the University of Washington, Seattle.