According to recent research presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference, consuming beetroot juice daily for six months after stent placement reduces the likelihood of angina patients having a heart attack or needing treatment again. The research on the benefits of vegetable juices was presented at a conference in Manchester and was supported by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
The researchers, based at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and Queen Mary University of London, found that 16 percent of angina patients had a serious heart or circulatory event, such as a heart attack or needed another procedure, in the two years after stent placement. However, when patients drank beetroot juice daily, it dropped to 7.5 percent.
Thousands of coronary heart disease patients in the UK each year have a stent implanted to widen a blood vessel in the heart and ease their angina, known as a percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
Beetroot juice was shown to be a safe and reliable way to get inorganic nitrate into the body, with no significant side effects experienced by the 300 patients in the trial, except for pink urine.
The team is now looking to start a larger trial soon. They hope that, if successful, beetroot juice could be prescribed as a treatment after stent implantation. This could then be extended beyond angina patients who have had stents for other reasons after a heart attack.
