She also described all of the side effects and that scared me so much that I decided not to take them. This is troubling because pulmonary hypertension, which is an increase in the blood pressure in the pulmonary arteries but not necessarily the other arteries of the body, cannot be easily checked, and can be quite serious. Occasionally pulmonary hypertension has been shown to go away after stopping these drugs, but not always. Although this side effect is a worrisome one, the problem has to be put in perspective.
Pulmonary hypertension is a very rare condition.
A recent study and editorial comment that considered exactly this issue estimated that about 1.2 cases of the disease develop in 1,000,000 people per year. Although the study claimed that people who had taken one of the drugs for more than three months during the year before developing pulmonary hypertension increased their risk by 23 times, this would still produce an annual rate of only 28 cases per 1,000,000. This is far below the annual rates of heart attacks, strokes, breast cancer, diabetes, and hypertension, to name only a few. One expert estimated the excess deaths due to obesity to be 1,260 lives per million per year. In prescribing appetite suppressants, as with all drugs or treatments, one has to weigh the risks against the benefits.