What drugs are used to treat cardiac problems and COPD?
There are too many different drugs used to treat these conditions to list here, but a common clinical concern is interactions between the medicines used to treat cardiac problems and COPD. For example, people with heart failure, high blood pressure, or coronary artery disease are often treated with beta-blockers, but patients with COPD are often treated with beta-agonists, drugs that actually stimulate the same receptor that’s blocked by beta-blockers. So those medications can be at odds. Depending on the severity of either of the two diseases, the medications would have to either be avoided or used with caution. The most common scenario is that patients who have heart failure are treated with a beta-blocker, but there’s some worry about that because they also have COPD. But as long as the COPD is mild and the patient has never needed to go to the emergency room or be hospitalized, they’d probably have more benefit from the beta-blocker than harm. At the other extreme, if somebody has
