Glucose-lowering diabetes drug could also reduce heart attacks

This diabetes drug was originally used to simply lower blood sugar — but experts have uncovered another promising benefit.

A new diabetes drug, originally used to simply lower blood sugar, has emerged as a potential saviour for preventing the leading cause of death among those with the chronic disease.

Heart attack is the biggest killer and cause of disability in diabetes. Constantly high blood sugars cause the plaques that build-up in arteries to be highly prone to rupturing, which can trigger a potentially fatal heart-stopping event.

A drug called dapagliflozin, a new class of glucose-lowering medication, has been shown to have the unexpected benefit of also preventing heart attack.

Now Melbourne researchers, led by the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute and Monash University, have uncovered for the first time why this drug is a powerful protector for the heart.

Further, they have created the first animal model that allows these new drugs to be tested for their impact on both diabetes and heart disease, paving the way for other promising treatments to be fast-tracked to the clinic.

Co-lead researcher and cardiologist Professor Karlheinz Peter said until now atherosclerosis, the condition where cholesterol plaques build up in the walls of arteries, was tricky to study in preclinical models.

A new diabetes drug used to lower blood sugar could also prevent heart attacks.

“Atherosclerosis is a disease of the whole body. You can’t study it with cells or assays. You have to have an animal model that imitates what we see in humans,” Prof Peter said.

“So far we can imitate that plaques build up but these plaques in the animals are typically stable so you can’t really study the plaque rupture that causes heart attack. This has been a big limitation so far.”

In their latest work, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, they were able to create an animal model that was both diabetic and had the same unstable plaques seen in humans, which they used to test this new drug.

“With this drug we have less inflammatory cells, the instability is gone. You have plaques sitting in your carotid arteries, but they don’t rupture and cause problems,” he said.

“We have for the first time an explanation where we can say this is probably the reason why these patients have less heart attacks.”

Prof Peter said their findings provided evidence to warrant more widespread use in Australia, as well as supported investigating its value in non-diabetic patients at risk of heart attack.

“As cardiologists we normally would not have touched drugs for diabetic patients, but now it’s moved from being a specialist drug to really having a broad indication,” he said.

“A lot of people will take these drugs and it will save the lives of many patients.”