Statin drugs, known primarily for their ability to lower cholesterol, also may reduce the overactive sympathetic nervous system response that contributes to the worsening of heart failure and increases the risk of sudden cardiac death, two University of Missouri-Columbia researchers have found. Heart failure is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States.
James Fisher, a postdoctoral fellow at MU, and Paul Fadel, an assistant professor of medical pharmacology and physiology in the MU School of Medicine, reported their findings of the effect of the popular statin drugs at Experimental Biology 2007 in Washington, D.C., part of the scientific program of The American Physiological Society.
Heart failure, sometimes called congestive heart failure, is a chronic condition in which the heart can no longer pump enough blood to the rest of the body, causing damage and negatively impacting the quality and duration of life.
In several large clinical trials, cholesterol-lowering statin medications improved survival and other health outcomes in patients with heart failure, an effect that appeared not to be solely due to lowering these patients? cholesterol levels. In the search for a possible mechanism to explain this observation, scientists have turned to measures of sympathetic nervous system activity.
The sympathetic nervous system controls blood pressure and heart rate. When a heart begins to fail, the sympathetic nervous system works harder to compensate by helping to maintain heart function, blood pressure and the delivery of needed blood to vital organs and peripheral muscles. While this increased activity is beneficial in the early stages of heart failure, prolonged full-tilt sympathetic nervous system overactivity soon becomes harmful, causing damage to the heart and kidneys.