Researchers Propose Diabetes, Heart Failure Connection

Patients with diabetes have an increased risk of heart failure because their heart cannot adapt to the toxic levels of glucose and lipids that build up in the heart muscle, cardiology researchers at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston have found.

"We have known that diabetes is an established risk factor for coronary artery disease, but diabetes does much more than put fatty deposits in the arteries. It also attacks the heart muscle, causing it to weaken and fail," said Dr. Heinrich Taegtmeyer, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at UT-Houston.

The findings – the second of a two-part series – were published in a recent issue of Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association.

There is a complex system of metabolic signals in the diabetic heart that cause it to become overloaded with glucose and fatty acids. The investigators call the phenomenon "glucolipotoxicity."

Dr. Martin Young, assistant professor of medicine and biochemistry at UT-Houston Medical School and co-author of the two-part perspective, said this finding put researchers one step closer to understanding why fat is so bad for the heart. Now that they are beginning to appreciate the metabolic process in the diabetic heart, they can develop medications or other methods for preventing the fat from going into the heart or somehow removing it from the heart muscle.

Dr. Patrick McNulty, associate professor of medicine at Penn State University, also contributed to the report.

Dr. Taegtmeyer said the proposed link between diabetes and heart failure could have a profound effect on public health. Diabetes mellitus, or Type 2 diabetes, and the prevalence of heart failure are growing at alarming rates in Western countries.

"Worldwide, there are about 145 million patients with diabetes – almost five times more than estimates of 10 years ago," Dr. Taegtmeyer said. "People are getting fatter. As a nation, we tend to eat too much, and we’ve also become very sedentary. There is no magic pill for diabetes and heart failure, but now we can identify critical steps in a chain of events that cause heart muscle to weaken, because it loads up with more fat and glucose that it can use."

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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