Groundbreaking UC Davis study could provide better understanding of heart failure
DAVIS — A potentially groundbreaking UC Davis study could give us more insight into heart failure, which is something that affects more than six million Americans.
Heart failure is a diagnosis that can be very deadly.
"The prognosis once you've got [congestive heart failure] is not great," said Donald Bers, the chair of the pharmacology department at the UC Davis School of Medicine. "Fifty percent of the people who get that diagnosis will be dead within five years."
Bers is a senior author of a study looking into heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF. It affects about half of people living with heart failure.
"None of the medicines that work well for patients that have traditional heart failure, where the heart just can't pump strong enough, none of those seem to help these patients," he said.
Through studying mice, researchers found that the diastolic dysfunction in female mice resulted from altered heart filament proteins. In male mice, it resulted from the slow removal of calcium from heart cells between heartbeats, causing a slight contraction to remain between beats. This basically means the causes of heart failure may be different in men and women.
"So the male mice and female mice really have separate molecular mechanisms that seem to drive the actual cardiac dysfunction," Bers said.
That means the best treatments may also be different for men and women, Bers added.
"Finding out which drugs are functioning effectively, using existing therapies would be one step," he said. "Another step would be to design new, more molecularly targeted therapies, which is another angle we're trying to pursue."
A lot of research still has to be done, but this is a great start. For anyone worried about heart failure, talk to your doctor and get to the gym.
"Doing things like exercise, managing other factors that can decrease your likelihood of getting heart failure in general," Bers said.
Obesity and diabetes are common in people with HFpEF. The findings were published in Cardiovascular Research.