WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cocaine can literally tear up your heart, causing damage usually only seen in older people with high blood pressure, researchers said on Monday.
They said doctors and emergency room workers should look for this condition, called aortic dissection, when a young patient has chest pain.
"For untreated aortic dissection, the mortality rate can be as high as 35 percent within the first 24 hours. After 48 hours the death rate rises to about 50 percent," Dr. Priscilla Hsue, a cardiologist at San Francisco General Hospital who led the study, said in a statement.
Hsue's team, writing in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, said they had noticed an increase in the numbers of young patients coming into their emergency room with chest pain.
"Most patients came to the hospital with chest pain shortly after drug use, and one developed symptoms while smoking crack," Hsue said.
Cocaine stimulates the production of stress hormones that can push up blood pressure. This may tear the lining of the aorta, allowing blood to enter and rip it even further, Hsue said. Blood may be prevented from reaching critical organs and the aorta can rupture.
"In urban settings aortic dissection should be considered when young people come to the emergency room with severe chest pain, especially if they have other risk factors like high blood pressure and smoking," Hsue said. "It's very important to get a rapid diagnosis.
Her team looked at hospital charts from 1981 to 2001 and found 38 cases of aortic dissection. Of these, 37 percent were related to cocaine use, they said.
Twenty-nine percent of the cocaine users died in the hospital, almost twice the death rate of non-users.