After a first warning at the end of 2021, the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM) drives home the point and calls for no longer using cold tablets. They could cause rare but devastating adverse effects (heart attack, stroke, etc.). The producing pharmaceutical laboratories consider the announcement premature.
Vasoconstrictors have long been popular for unblocking the nose. At the beginning of the 2000s, they were among the Top 5 best-selling drugs in pharmacies. But it was the drug policeman that they ended up giving headaches.
From 2012 to 2018, the national pharmacology database recorded 307 serious cases of stroke or heart attack in people who had taken a pill to treat a simple cold!
In question, its active ingredient: pseudoephedrine. Whether this vasoconstrictor is clad in Actifed, Dolirhume, Humex, Nurofen, or Rhinadvil, it doesn’t matter. It has demonstrated a benefit-risk ratio largely to its disadvantage, according to health authorities. So, after having sounded the alarm many times, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products has just said stop through the voice of Christelle Ratignier-Carbonneil, its president.
“Don’t use them anymore.”
“I want to say to the French: don’t use them anymore,” she told Le Parisien yesterday. “Myocardial infarctions and strokes can occur after their use. […]. These very serious events can occur regardless of the dose and duration of treatment”, explains the president of the ANSM. And for good reason, the vasoconstrictors which pass into the blood slightly close the vessels, which has the effect of clear the nose. But in doing so, they narrow all the vessels, not just those in the head. So, if you have a heart problem, this tightening can cause total obstruction and lead to a stroke or heart attack! “Even “without disease, there is a risk. Very clearly, the benefit-risk ratio is unfavorable”, according to the doctors, who support the ANSM’s decision, with a large part of the medical profession: National Order of Pharmacists, unions, College general medicine, ENT…
Enough to give pause to cold victims who are reluctant to spend ten days in apnea with a blocked nose, especially at night. But also the pharmaceutical manufacturing laboratories which sniff at a loss of turnover, even if the ANSM does not formally request that the incriminated drugs be withdrawn from the market.
In 2017, the ban on advertising these products alerted patients. And the labs had seen their sales divided by five compared to the end of the 2000s. But they had still limited the damage and were still selling three million boxes per year since 2020. Also, they hoped that France would wait until minus the European arbitration, pending since February 2023. The ANSM decided otherwise.
There remains the diehards, who cannot sleep with a blocked nose. Patients with contraindications have long since made up their minds. In cases of hypertension, diabetes, history of stroke, convulsion, coronary insufficiency, hyperthyroidism, ocular glaucoma or pregnancy, vasoconstrictors were no longer in the medicine cabinets. Also, they experimented with grandmother’s remedies which have proven their effectiveness.
For example, legally snorting…salt water. Cheaper than a seawater nasal spray. Enough to reconcile those with eternal colds with the Andrzej Żuławski film, “My nights are more beautiful than your days”.