It’s been reported in many places this particular link from MSNBC.com that is looking at a recent study that came out that looked at changing the timing of your blood pressure medicine could reduce your risk for heart attack or stroke in the early morning hours. Those of us that are in the emergency setting know that often heart attacks and strokes happen to people on the wee hours of the morning just before they start to wake up. For whatever reason whether the body’s circadian rhythms or whatever, there seems to be a spike somehow in the heart’s system at that point in time so we see a lot of cardiac problems first thing in the morning sometimes in patients. In that case maybe that by shifting their meds to another time of the day like taking them right before bedtime that the moderating effects of their blood pressure medications can affect the physiology in such a way that that spike that is causing this problems seems to be lessened and the risk factors for that go down.
Certainly, a lot of people take the medications as once-a-day medication in the morning and I just wanted to point this article out. A lot of you read it and probably already taken it to heart but it is important for us depending on what you do as a nurse to make sure that you’re aware of things like this and to be able to advice your patients when they are taking a large number of medicines or certain types of medications to ask the question “Hey! Tell me a little bit about how and when you take this. What’s your schedule for your daily meds? Let’s take a look at that.” Maybe sit down with a pharmacist or another resource in your area, a nurse practitioner or your physician prescriber and look at some of the research out there that may have come out. Some patients are taking the same meds for 10 or 15 years never change the way they started taking it. Maybe they didn’t take it right to begin with or maybe the study has come out to change how they should be taking it and then a recommendation has changed since they first started taking the med. Whatever the case, use this as an opportunity to work with your patients. Maybe they need to come off of some of their meds. Maybe they shouldn’t be taking them concurrently. They should be taking it few hours apart for each other in some cases. This is again just maybe you can alleviate the heath problem for one or more of your patients by just keeping these kinds of things at the back of your mind. So I just wanted to point this out. This article was well publicized and probably a lot of you saw it but this points out that there are all kinds of research studies like this out there at when to best take medicines, with or without food and otherwise. We should be aware of that looking at our drug guides and talking with our pharmacy resources and trying to help our patients make the best decision on how we schedule their medication regimen.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Nursing Care Challenge Interview with Rob Fraser and Episode 199.
