NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – In patients with stable coronary artery disease, supplementing calcium channel blockers with perindopril decreases mortality and improves cardiac outcomes, new research shows.

After about four years, the combination had reduced mortality by almost half compared to calcium channel blockers alone, according to a report in the American Heart Journal for May.

Dual therapy also decreased the rate of the composite endpoint (cardiovascular death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, and resuscitated cardiac arrest) by a third.

The authors, led by Dr. Michel E. Bertrand from Hopital Cardiologique, Lille, France, note that patients taking a calcium channel blocker at baseline in the EUROPA trial had better cardiac outcomes when treatment with perindopril (8 mg/day once daily) was added. Their current post hoc analysis focused on the effect of perindopril in trial participants who either took calcium channel blockers continuously (for an average of 4.2 years) or not al all.

They had four groups of patients with stable coronary artery disease:
-Calcium channel blocker plus perindopril (n = 1022)
-Calcium channel blocker plus placebo (n = 1100)
-Perindopril plus placebo (n = 3326), and
-Placebo only (n = 3095).

Fewer patients in the combined perindopril plus calcium channel blocker group (4.9%) reached the composite endpoint than in the other groups