Drug Interactions between Traditional Chinese Medicines and Cardiovascular Drugs

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and its internal medicine treatments are mostly single/few-target chemical drugs. Long-term use of cardiovascular drugs for complex chronic diseases may lead to serious adverse drug reactions. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been used to treat heart diseases for thousands of years, helping to ease symptoms and prolong patients' lifespan in ancient China. TCM has the pharmacological characteristics of being multi-component, multi-target and multi-pathway, and the combined application of TCM and western medicine can be an alternative treatment for chronic and intractable diseases with high safety levels. This article reviewed the interactions and synergistic effect of TCM and cardiovascular drugs. In the treatment of arrhythmia, TCM combined with western medicine can more effectively regulate patients' cardiac electrophysiological characteristics, reduce the onsets of premature beat and heart rate variability, lower the levels of QT interval dispersion and serum inflammatory factors, alleviate clinical symptoms and TCM syndromes, and improve cardiac function with good safety levels. In the treatment of hypertension, integrative medicine can more steadily reduce blood pressure and levels of serum inflammatory factors and improve hemodynamic indexes and exercise tolerance, and it has high safety levels, especially for pregnant women. As for coronary heart disease, the combination of TCM and antiplatelet drugs may promote the absorption of each other. However, the interaction risk of pharmacokinetic mechanism between them is low at the dose of efficacy. Integrative medicine can reduce the level of N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide, delay cardiac remodeling and improve heart function and quality of life for patients with heart failure with high safety levels.