Doctors try to save patients with heart failure
Date: 05-06-2007
Posted by: Anabolic Info TeamRussia |
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American doctors are starting a dramatic experiment this month to try to save patients dying from congestive heart failure by temporarily resting their hearts, then boosting them with a drug long abused for bodybuilding.
The goal: To help the heart heal itself, and rescue patients who otherwise would not survive without a heart transplant or an implanted machine to pump their hearts.
"The provocative question is, once you get to that level, is it too late or are there people still recoverable even at that point?" asks Dr. Clyde Yancy of the American Heart Association, who is closely monitoring the experiment.
The study is very small, and there is no way to predict whether it will work. British scientists reported a tantalizing hint last fall that the combination of a temporarily implanted heart pump and an asthma drug not approved for sale in this country - the athlete-abused clenbuterol - just might offer hope of recovery for this common, intractable killer.
"We think this is a completely novel way to look at the treatment of heart failure," says Dr. Leslie Miller of Washington Hospital Center in the nation's capital, one of seven U.S. study sites.
Almost 5 million Americans, and 20 million people worldwide, have congestive heart failure. Their hearts are weakened by age, damage from a survived heart attack, or other problems. The condition can strike seemingly healthy young people, too, for no discernible reason.
Some drugs and pacemakers treat heart failure very well. But often the disease worsens over years, the heart weakening until patients find it difficult even to walk across a room. Fluid seeps into their lungs and blocks breathing.
They have few options: A transplant - only about 2,200 U.S. hearts are donated in the United States every year, while 58,000 Americans die of heart failure annually - or an implanted heart pump. These devices give the heart a rest, taking over the pumping action that normally is the job of the left ventricle. Implants last only a few years.
Here is where the plot thickens: Patients can improve remarkably on these pumps. Flabby enlarged hearts shrink. Cardiac muscle cells long thought unsalvageable instead seem to repair. The occasional patient gets well enough to avoid a transplant; very rarely, one recovers enough to have the implanted pump removed, too.
The question is how to control that repair so more people might benefit.
