An erectile dysfunction drug could treat heart failure – new study

In the 1990s, the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer was developing drugs to treat angina pectoris. In the first trials of these drugs, male participants reported a striking side effect: they had erections. This discovery led to the development of drugs to treat erectile dysfunction. Our latest study shows that one of these erectile dysfunction drugs (Cialis) is very effective at treating a particular type of heart failure in sheep.

Heart failure is a devastating condition that occurs when the heart is too weak to pump blood throughout the body. People with heart failure often can not perform the basic tasks without becoming breathless and coughless. It is also a condition where survival is worse than for many common forms of cancer. The high rates of heart failure and the fact that survival is low highlight the need for newer and more effective treatments for this condition.

In a healthy person, the heart pumps more blood when we train. This increase in work done by the heart is caused by the adrenaline hormone that speeds up the heartbeat and boosts pumping. In case of heart failure, the heart no longer responds properly to epinephrine, which means that it can not increase the amount of work that it performs nor pump blood in a way effective when we are exercising.

We discovered that tadalafil (generic name Cialis) was very effective in preventing heart failure from worsening. It was also surprisingly effective in reversing some changes that occurred in the failing heart before the drug was administered. In particular, the heart could again respond correctly to adrenaline and contract more strongly. In addition, tadalafil reversed the changes in the structure of muscle cells of the heart during the development of heart failure.

The results of this study, published in Nature, Scientific Reports, may also help explain why people who take medications intermittently to treat their erectile dysfunction seem less likely to suffer a heart attack or die as a result of a seizure. heart. Our research is in addition to the small number of clinical studies in patients with heart failure who reported that sildenafil (Viagra), a combination drug, improved patients' ability to exercise. , but the mechanisms behind these positive effects were not yet known.

Cautious optimism

Despite the encouraging results of our study and the fact that drugs to treat erectile dysfunction are now available without a prescription, we must remain cautious. The RELAX trial, which reported results in 2013, showed no improvement in exercise capacity in patients treated with sildenafil.

The reason for these differences is probably due to the fact that two types of heart failure have been studied in these clinical trials, positive trials in patients with systolic heart failure and neutral trials in patients with diastolic heart failure. In systolic heart failure, the heart does not contract (pump) adequately, while in diastolic heart failure, the heart contracts normally but the relaxation between heartbeats is impaired.

Nevertheless, experimental results from our tadalafil study and clinical trials in patients with systolic heart failure offer new hope for effective treatment of heart failure.

Although the work of our study has been done with the help of sheep, the strong similarities between their heart and their heart in the way they work and react to diseases give us badurance that these results will be reproduced in humans. Indeed, clinical trials using tadalafil in heart failure patients are the next step in the process of adding tadalafil to our toolkit to treat heart failure patients, and we hope to start them in the near future .