09/17 19:16 Healthy man has heart attack after taking Viagra
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON, Sept 18 (Reuters) - A Dutch man suffered a heart attack 30
minutes after taking the anti-impotence pill Viagra even though he had no
medical condition that could cause adverse reactions to the drug, doctors said
on Friday.
The doctors, from the Inspectorate of Health Care in the Netherlands, reported
the incident in a letter in The Lancet medical journal published three days after
the pill was approved for use in Europe.
The 65-year-old man was not taking nitrates, had no history of heart or liver
problems, high blood pressure or diabetes, never smoked and was a moderate
drinker.
The heart attack could also not have been triggered by sexual exertion, they
added, because the man did not try to have sex in the half hour after he took the
drug, which is known generically as sildenafil.
"The close temporal relation between ingesting sildenafil and onset of severe
chest pain due to acute myocardial infarction (heart attack)...suggests that
sildenafil was causally related," Dr Bruno Stricker said in the letter.
The man was prescribed the drug by a doctor while he was in the United
States, where Viagra has been available since March. He took the drug and
suffered the heart attack in Aruba, an island in the Caribbean.
Fanny Bok, a spokeswoman for the inspectorate, said doctors on the island
notified the organisation.
"It is the first time they had seen someone with a heart attack who was healthy
and didn't have any risk factors," she explained in a telephone interview.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said 69 men who were
taking Viagra have died. The average age of the men who died was 64.
But of those 69, "nearly all had underlying risk factors for cardiovascular
disease", said Dr Ian Osterloh of Pfizer Inc <PFE.N>, the pharmaceutical
company which manufactures the drug.
"There is no evidence at all that Viagra causes heart attack and death,"
Osterloh, global candidate team leader at Pfizer, told a news conference to
mark the drug's European approval on Tuesday.
Viagra works by allowing more blood to the penis during sexual arousal.
Stricker suggested a redistribution of blood flow in the arteries may have
affected the blood flow through the heart and could have led to the Dutch man's
seizure.
Emphasising that the number of patients in Pfizer's trials of the drug are small in
comparison to the expected use of Viagra, he called for more studies.
"The number of reported adverse reactions to sildenafil is likely to increase
when it is taken by large numbers of men."
Pfizer says that in clinical trials the incidence of heart attacks was the same for
men taking Viagra as those given a placebo.
Osterloh said the drug had been given to three million Americans, equating to
two years of clinical experience for the average drug.
REUTERS
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