Chicago – Holiday revelers, beware: Seasonal indulgences such as eggnog and fruitcake might give you heartburn, but the acid-fighting medicine you take for relief might lead to something worse, researchers say.
People on popular prescription heartburn drugs – Prilosec, Prevacid and Nexium – seem more prone to getting a potentially dangerous diarrhea caused by the bug Clostridium difficile, new research shows. C-diff, as it’s known, can cause severe diarrhea and crampy intestinal inflammation called colitis.
Dr. Sandra Dial and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal examined data on more than 18,000 patients in the United Kingdom from 1994 to 2004. In that time, 1,672 cases of C-diff were diagnosed, increasing from less than 1 per 100,000 in 1994 to 22 per 100,000 last year.
Patients taking acid-fighters called proton pump inhibitors, which include Prilosec and Prevacid, were almost three times as likely to be diagnosed with the bug as those not taking the drugs. Those on less potent prescription drugs called H2 receptor antagonists, such as Pepcid and Zantac, were two times as likely to get C-diff.
The drugs reduce levels of gastric acid that can keep C-diff germs at bay. Doctors think the increasing C-diff infections are due in part to overuse of antibiotics, but the new data suggest overuse of acid-fighting drugs may be another reason, said Dr. Michael Brown, a gastroenterologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who was not involved in the study.
Brown said short-term use of the drugs for occasional over-imbibing is unlikely to increase infection risks in otherwise healthy people, but doctors and patients may “have to think twice about using such heavy acid suppression” long term.
