Effects of chronic long-term therapy with calcium antagonists on cytogenetic damage in humans

Objective To assess whether chronic long-term calcium antagonist therapy ma y increase genotoxicity, the chromosome aberration test, a widely accepted genotoxic assay, was used ex vivo in peripheral human lymphocytes of patien ts with or without long-term exposure to calcium antagonist therapy. Methods and results In a case-control study design, we evaluated 30 ischaem ic and/or hypertensive patients (22 males, eight females; age 59.4 +/- 1.5 years), under chronic calcium antagonist treatment (group I), for more than 3 years (4.4 +/- 0.34 years) and 30 age-matched subjects, without any prev ious exposure to calcium antagonists (group II). Venous blood samples were collected from the patients and cultures were set up for cytogenetic analys is by standard methods. For each subject, 100 metaphases were scored. The two groups showed similar values (mean +/- SEM) for percentage aberrant cells (group I 2.6 +/- 0.3 v ersus group II 2.5 +/- 0.3, not significant), percentage structural aberrat ions (group I 1.9 +/- 0.3 versus group II 1.8 +/- 0.2, not significant) and percentage numerical aberrations (group I 0.70 +/- 0.2 versus group II 0.7 3 +/- 0.2, not significant). Conclusions Long-term calcium antagonist therapy is not associated with an increased incidence of chromosomal indices of genotoxic damage in humans. J Hypertens 1999, 17:843-846 (C) Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.