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Viagra Rescues Heart Cells
Drug may offer protection following heart attack
Betterhumans Staff
2/1/2005 12:51 PM
The erectile dysfunction
drug Viagra helps protect
heart cells from death in the lab and may do the same in humans
following a heart attack.
Viagra—sildenafil citrate—is attracting attention for saving hearts as well as marriages. Last week, for example, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland found that it can treat enlarged hearts in mice.
American researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond have
now shown that Viagra
could help treat people with heart failure in which loss of cells
is largely due to cell suicide.
"This research has established a strong basis for the design of future studies targeted toward investigating the clinical effects of sildenafil on survival of heart muscle following a major heart attack," says Rakesh Kukreja, the study's lead author.
Suicide prevention
Kukreja and colleagues found that administration of Viagra led to therapeutic levels of nitric oxide (NO) in mouse heart cells through an increase in two enzymes responsible for synthesizing the molecule.
Simulating heart attack-like conditions in a Petri dish, the researchers showed that this process inhibits cell death by stabilizing mitochondria, increasing levels of an anti-death protein called Bcl-2 and inhibiting a cell killing protein called caspase 3.
"In addition, these findings suggest that this drug may slow or possibly reverse the progressive loss of heart cells during chronic heart failure in patients with coronary artery disease," says Kukreja.
source:-http://www.betterhumans.com |
