Taking Cordarone for shorter periods of time did little to ease side effects and left patients with a higher risk of premature death than those taking it for long periods, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Long-term use of the drug, which is known generically as amiodarone, is taken by people with atrial fibrillation, but as Reuters notes, it can cause allergies, liver, lung and other health problems. The study explored whether shorter use would help, but no luck.

“This study shows that episodic amiodarone treatment - in contrast to our expectations - has no clinical advantage over continuous treatment because it did not lower morbidity in patients with persistent atrial fibrillation over 2 years of follow-up,” the researchers wrote (here’s the study).

In August, the FDA warned about the risk of a rare type of muscle injury seen when the cholesterol drug simvastatin is combined with amiodarone (back story).

The Dutch trial included 209 men and women with irregular heartbeats assigned to receive either continuous or short-term treatment of two months. The researchers put those in the short-term group back on medication for a two-month burst if their irregular heartbeats returned.

When the researchers followed up at two years, they found about half the people on reduced treatment had normal heartbeats compared with about 64 percent of people who had been on the medicine for the entire two years.

Serious problems from the drug or an underlying condition that required hospitalisation or medical intervention were slightly higher in the short-term group, Isabelle Van Gelder of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, tells Reuters.

And the number of deaths from any cause were about 53 percent in the short-term group, compared with 34 percent among the other volunteers, indicating that reducing the drug is not an option for doctors. “Considering the above, episodic amiodarone treatment cannot be advocated for most patients with persistent atrial fibrillation,” they wrote.

Source: Reuters