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Heart beat
For a while, one of the hot topics in heart disease was whether bacterial infections lead to atherosclerosis, the artery-clogging process underlying heart disease and stroke. Bacteria such as Chlamydia pneumoniae are often found in pockets of cholesterol-filled plaque embedded in blood vessels throughout the body. Are they just bystanders, or do they somehow contribute to atherosclerosis?
That’s a tough question to answer, because it wouldn’t exactly be ethical to inoculate one group of people with bacteria and another with a placebo, and then see who develops heart disease. Researchers have come at it from a different angle: giving people potent antibiotics or a placebo for a year or more.
Two large trials show that, at least in people with heart disease, antibiotics don’t work any better than sugar pills at preventing heart attacks, strokes, deaths from heart disease, or the need for a procedure to open or bypass a blocked coronary artery. The results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich, Germany, at the end of the summer.
“These studies offer the final word that antibiotics don’t prevent or control heart disease,” says Harvard cardiologist Christopher P. Cannon, who led one of the trials. “Instead, we should focus on methods proven to work, such as exercise and medications such as aspirin, statins, and ACE inhibitors.”