How Does Hydrazaline Help with Heart Failure?

(LifeWire) - Hydaralazine is a drug that widens blood vessels, which helps lower blood pressure and allows the heart to pump with less effort. It's prescribed to treat high blood pressure and heart failure.

Women with pre-eclampsia or eclampsia -- conditions that occur in pregnancy and are marked by high blood pressure -- may be given hydralazine to lower their blood pressure.

Hydralazine used to be sold by Novartis under the brand name Apresoline. In the United States, hydralazine is now available only in generic form. It can be given as a pill or an injection. Often it is prescribed together with a nitrate to increase its effect on the blood vessels.

The hydralazine-nitrate drug combination involves taking several pills every day, which some people find hard to do over an extended period of time. Many heart failure and high blood pressure patients are also better able to tolerate newer medications like angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors.

For these reasons, hydralazine isn't as widely prescribed as it once was for heart failure or high blood pressure. Nonetheless, some research suggests that hydralazine and a nitrate may provide a significant blood pressure-lowering benefit, especially for African-American heart failure patients, when combined with one or more other medications.

Possible side effects of hydralazine can include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of appetite, constipation, nasal congestion, headaches, flushing and dizziness. Taking hydralazine with food or combined with a beta blocker (another type of blood pressure-lowering medication) may make side effects less troublesome.

More serious side effects can also occur. Contact your doctor if you experience fainting, skin rash, rapid or irregular heartbeat, swelling, numbness or tingling, chest pain, fever, or pain in joints or muscles. In rare cases, hydralazine has been associated with systemic lupus erythematosus, a serious immune system disorder.

Some researchers recommend avoiding the following substances when taking hydralazine because they may either decrease or increase the effect of the drug -- alcohol, dong quai, ephedra, yohimbe, ginseng, garlic and grapefruit or grapefruit juice. Spacing out the time when you ingest grapefruit from the time when you take hydrazaline by several hours is not a sufficient safeguard, so avoiding it altogether is best.

Sources: