A medication used to treat type 2 diabetes has proved effective at reducing the risk of heart failure in people predisposed to suffer with the condition.
Researchers said the findings, published in Nature Medicine, highlight the growing potential for incorporating genetic screening into heart failure prevention strategies.
The treatment, known as dapagliflozin, could help people who suffer with rare genetic variants known to cause cardiomyopathy, an inherited cause of a weak heart, they said.
While dapagliflozin reduced heart failure hospitalisations by 32 per cent in non-carriers compared to placebo, the drug reduced risk in cardiomyopathy variant carriers by about 80 per cent in the study by Mass General Brigham Heart and Vascular Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
“Historically, identifying a genetic variant for cardiomyopathy mostly meant telling a patient they were at high risk and not having a specific preventative therapy to offer,” said co-lead author Shinwan Kany, a visiting scientist at the Cardiovascular Research Centre with Mass General Brigham Heart and Vascular Institute. The study shows we do have “tools to lower risk in these individuals”, he added.
It was possible that moving toward “early, genetically guided intervention could allow us to protect these vulnerable patients long before they develop symptoms”, said co-author Christian Ruff.
Dapagliflozin treats diabetes by increasing the excretion of glucose and sodium in urine, a process that among other things may help the heart work more efficiently. People with diabetes are often at higher risk of heart disease.
The researchers studied 12,685 patients over an average of 4.2 years.
Because all participants in the trial had type 2 diabetes, researchers emphasize that further research is needed to determine if dapagliflozin is equally effective in cardiomyopathy variant carriers who do not have diabetes.
