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Experimental evidence suggests that allopurinol lowers myocardial oxygen consumption. To assess whether this effect might benefit patients with cardiac ischemia, U.K. investigators randomized 60 patients with chronic stable exertion-induced angina, angiographically proven coronary artery disease, and positive exercise stress tests to add daily allopurinol (600 mg) or placebo to their baseline angina medications for 6 weeks; patients then crossed over to the opposite treatment for 6 weeks.
Exercise stress testing was performed after randomization and at the end of each treatment period. Compared with placebo recipients, allopurinol recipients exhibited significantly longer mean total exercise time (393 vs. 307 seconds), mean time to ST depres…