FROM OUR experts
a historical look
at 5 popular heart medications Are you taking any of them? BY AMBER SMITH
SOME OF THE NEWER cardiac drugs were chemically designed in laboratories before going through years of expensive clinical trials and eventually gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Some of the older drugs, which are still in use today, were discovered by accident — and spent years becoming accepted, purified and widely used. Harold Smulyan, MD, a professor emeritus at Upstate who specializes in cardiology and enjoys history, researched aspirin, atropine, digitalis, nitroglycerin and quinidine. He published “e Beat Goes On: e Story of Five Ageless Cardiac Drugs” in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 2018. is information is pulled from his work.
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U P S TAT E H E A LT H
aspirin
atropine
Discovered: 4,000 years ago
Discovered: by ancient Greeks
Came from: bark and leaves of the willow tree, whose sap contains salicin, which the body metabolizes into salicylic acid
Came from: glossy-coated black berries of the deadly nightshade plant
First used: to treat pain, fever and inflammation Documented in: clay tablets le by the Assyrians and Babylonians; also recorded use among Egyptian, Chinese and Greek civilizations in 1300 BC; by Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 BC) and Roman anatomist Galen (200-216 AD); and by an English reverend in 1763 who wrote about the relief of fever in 50 patients, many of whom probably had malaria Synthesized: around 1860; because salicylic acid was a gastric irritant that could cause bleeding in large doses, the Bayer company sought chemical analogues that would be better tolerated and eventually made aspirin available in tablet form in 1900 Used today to: relieve pain, reduce fever, prevent vascular heart disease
First used: as a cosmetic for women (Cleopatra used atropine to dilate her pupils in the last century BC), and a poison for assassins (the military made a deadly paste from atropine for the tips of their arrows during the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages) Documented in: Greek mythology, with the plant being named Atropos, aer one of the three goddesses of fate and destiny Synthesized: by a German chemist in the 1830s Used today to: increase slow heart rates or improve conduction in some types of irregular heart rhythms; and as an antidote to accidental organophosphate poisoning and to nerve gases used in warfare Side note: Attracted to the sweetness of the berries, people have been poisoned accidentally
Side note: A pharmacist at Bayer who worked on an aspirin analogue was preoccupied at the time with the sales potential of a new Bayer cough remedy synthesized in 1897 called heroin. upstate.edu l winter 2019
