While the study results need to be confirmed, commentators say the research provides another reason to reduce unnecessary use of the drugs --called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) -- which are both prescribed and sold over the counter in Australia.
The drugs include the active ingredients omeprazole, esomeprazole, pantoprazole, rabeprazole, lansoprazole, which all work by reducing the amount of stomach acid produced.
"These drugs may not be as safe as we think," says senior author Dr Nicholas Leeper, an assistant professor of vascular surgery and of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University.
The new research, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, relied on mining data from millions of electronic medical records in the United States.
"The risk is small," says lead author Dr Nigam Shah also from Stanford, whose team developed the data mining method used in the study.
"If 4357 people take proton pump inhibitors for two weeks, this will mean one additional heart attack."
But, he says, given how widely used the drugs are, this could result in many additional heart attacks
"Even if it's a tiny elevation of risk at the individual level, at a population level it adds up to pretty large numbers."
The market for PPIs is worth $13 billion worldwide, say the researchers.
According to NPS MedicineWise, PPIs are one of the most widely used medicines in Australia, dispensed over 19 million times and contributing to around $350 million to the PBS expenditure in 2013-14.
Comment: While the overuse of antibiotics has played havoc with our gut microbiome, the epidemic rise in celiac disease is likely caused by a number of factors. One of which is that modern grains contain significantly more gluten than traditional varieties of the same grains and are thus more toxic. In addition, the mass introduction of GMOs over the past decade has contributed to an explosion in diagnoses of gluten sensitivity. The increase of GMO crops has also resulted in the expanded use of glyphosate which has been linked to celiac disease.