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Several online weight-loss supplements may have hidden heart risks

13 May 2009

MedWire News: Several non-prescription weight-loss supplements available through

the internet contain ingredients with potentially life-threatening cardiac adverse events, US researchers say.They found that eight of the 12 weight-loss supplements studied contained one or more ingredients associated with cardiac arrhythmias or other life-threatening cardiac events.The team searched for weight-loss supplements and diet pills using three popular internet search engines, and bought the top four non-overlapping hits returned from each search. All supplements had ingredients listed on the label, adding up to a total of 60 different substances. Eleven ingredients - representing eight different substances as more than one name was used for some - were each associated with two or more reports of either cardiac arrhythmias, ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, myocardial infarction,cardiac arrest, or death. Eight of the 12 supplements contained one or more of these ingredients, but none of these products had warnings of life-threatening cardiac adverse events on the web pages, labels, or package inserts. One product listed ma huang, or Chinese ephedra, even though the marketing of ephedra-containing products is banned in the USA, report Mehdi Razavi and co-workers at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston.
The other potentially hazardous ingredients were bitter orange (also listed as Citrus aurantium and synephrine HCl), green tea (also listed as Camellia sinensis),
buckwheat, guarana, ginseng (listed as Korean ginseng), licorice root, caffeine anhydrous, and ha huang root. “The use of multiple names for the same substance can cause a great deal of confusion, even for physicians,” said Razavi, whose team reports the findings in the journal Heart Rhythm.

The researchers suggest the general public, health care professionals, and especially

weight-loss consultants need to be educated about these weight-loss supplements.
“We recommend more strict regulation of the sale and marketing of weight-loss
supplements on the Internet,’ they say.
MedWire is an independent clinical news service provided by Current Medicine
Group, a part of Springer Science+Business Media. © Current Medicine Group Ltd;
2009
Heart Rhythm 2009; 6: 658-662
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