In a new study from the Baker Institute, researchers found vitamin E could be used to save muscle from dying during a heart attack.
The finding sheds new light on the potential of the therapy with vitamin E in patients with heart attack, and may ultimately offer an effective low-cost treatment.
Heart attack is a leading cause of death worldwide and new treatment strategies are highly sought-after. Unfortunately, lasting damage to the heart muscle is not uncommon following such an event.
One of the most effective anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory agents is vitamin E and its derivatives.
Interestingly, Vitamin E has been trialled unsuccessfully for preventing heart attacks but has not been investigated for actually treating heart attacks.
In the study, the treatment regime reflects clinical conditions, where patients could receive their first application of vitamin E in the ambulance or upon their arrival in the emergency department, before reopening and stenting the blocked vessel and the following days in the hospital before discharge.
The next step is to test an already approved formulation of Vitamin E in patients admitted with a heart attack. They plan to prove that heart function is preserved using sensitive magnetic resonance imaging.
The team says as there is currently no drug available that can reduce the cardiac damage caused by an overshooting inflammation after reopening of a blocked coronary artery, the potential impact of our finding on cardiovascular health would be significant.
The doses of vitamin E given in this study are approved to be safe by the European Commission Scientific Committee on Food.
If you care about heart health, please read studies about this common antibiotic drug linked to higher heart attack risk and findings of this bone problem strongly linked to heart disease in women.
For more information about heart disease, please see recent studies about this diabetes drug may increase risk of heart failure and results showing that this common health issue in middle-age may predict heart failure later in life.
The study is published in Redox Biology. One author of the study is Professor Karlheinz Peter.
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