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Ibuprofen, the painkiller found in Motrin and Advil, may increase the risk of heart problems in patients who take aspirin daily to lower cardiovascular risk, a new study has found.

The study was published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, suspect that ibuprofen may reduce the positive effects daily low-dose aspirin has on patients' cardiovascular system.

Study Results

In the study, the researchers reviewed data on over 18,000 patients with osteoarthritis who were taking either Prexige – a cox-2 inhibitor – or ibuprofen or naproxen.

The study found that the use of ibuprofen by patients also taking aspirin increased the chances of those patients having a heart attack or stroke within a year by nine times compared to patients who took cox-2 inhibiting painkillers instead.

“This adds more data to the fact that perhaps ibuprofen inhibits aspirin in a clinically significant way,” said director of interventional cardiology at Montefiore Weiler Division in New York City Dr. E. Scott Monrad. Dr. Monrad was not involved in the study.

“You can't draw firm conclusions from this paper, but it raises the question that perhaps we should do a formal study looking at ibuprofen versus some of these other agents in patients who are at high cardiovascular risk and seeing if it really does hold up,” said another expert, Dr. Robert Scott III, a Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine assistant professor, and senior staff cardiologist.

Previous Studies

Previous studies have also found that ibuprofen may interfere with aspirin's benefits for patients with a high risk of cardiovascular events.

“Most of the data that's been generated in the past has been carried out in patients who do not have overt cardiac disease,” explained lead author of the study, Dr. Michael Farkouh, director of the Mount Sinai Heart Clinical Trials in New York City. “We really have not studied cardiac patients that thoroughly.”

“If cardiac patients take ibuprofen over-the-counter, that's a danger because doctors aren't aware of it … it blocks the effect of aspirin, so there's more hear failure, more heart attacks, more hypertension. It's an important public health message,” said Farkouh.

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