Novel treatment approach to improve cardiac pump function in heart failure patients

A clinical study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden shows that the hunger hormone ghrelin can increase the heart’s pump capacity in patients with heart failure.Ghrelin is an endogenous hormone that has many receptors distributed in cardiac muscle tissues. It increases the appetite and stimulates the release of growth hormones.

In this double-blind study, 30 patients with heart failure were randomly assigned to two groups, receiving either active treatment with ghrelin or a placebo given intravenously for two hours. The participants were followed up after two to five days.

After two hours’ treatment, the cardiac output (i.e. the volume of blood pumped by the heart in one minute) had increased by an average of 28 percent in the ghrelin group, which can be compared with a small reduction in the placebo group. The reason for the increase was that more blood was pumped from the heart per beat, as the heart rate remained unchanged or was even slightly slower. At the two- to five-day follow-up, the pump capacity was 10 percent higher in the ghrelin group compared to in the placebo group.

To study the underlying mechanisms responsible for the increase in pump function, the researchers also studied mouse heart cells in the laboratory. They observed that treatment with ghrelin increased the contractile function of the heart cells, and they identified a novel molecular mechanism for this increase.

Reference:

“Acyl ghrelin improves cardiac function in heart failure and increases fractional shortening in cardiomyocytes without calcium mobilization”,European Heart Journal,doi 10.1093/eurheartj/ehad100