About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risks
By Mayo Clinic staffSome doctors are concerned about the safety of chelation therapy as a treatment for heart disease. Potential side effects of chelation therapy include:
- A burning sensation at the injection site
- Fever
- A sudden drop in blood pressure
- Headache
- Nausea
- Vomiting
- Inability to create new blood cells
- Mineral deficiencies
Keep in mind that in chelation therapy, the medication used binds not only to metals and calcium in your blood, but also to minerals that are an important part of your diet. Following chelation therapy, you'll be given vitamin supplements that contain large amounts of the minerals that chelation therapy removes from your body. It's important that you carefully follow the instructions for taking the vitamins if you choose to have chelation therapy for heart disease.
Rare complications of chelation therapy include permanent kidney damage or failure. Deaths have occurred in some chelation studies.
Because of the known risks and unknown benefits of chelation therapy, talk to your doctor before trying it as a heart disease treatment.
- Questions and answers about chelation therapy. American Heart Association. http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3000843. Accessed July 7, 2010.
- Trial to assess chelation therapy. National Institutes of Health. http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00044213. Accessed July 7, 2010.
- Questions and answers: The NIH trial of EDTA chelation therapy for coronary artery disease. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. http://nccam.nih.gov/health/chelation/. Accessed July 7, 2010.
- Seely DMR, et al. EDTA chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease: A systematic review. BMC Cardiovascular Diseases. 2005;5:32.
- Knudtson ML, et al. Chelation therapy for ischemic heart disease: A randomized, controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association. 2002;287:481.
Find Mayo Clinic on