In a new study from Michigan Medicine, researchers found a medium-chain fatty acid in energy drinks might one day help protect against heart attack injuries.
Heart attacks are still a leading cause of death worldwide, which often come with devastating complications.
In the study, the team was able to protect against heart attack injury in rat models with octanoic acid, an eight carbon (8C) medium-chain fatty acid, as well as a few other metabolites.
Those fatty acids produced acetyl-CoA, a building block for energy metabolism, which a stressed heart desperately needs.
The idea is that a physician would administer this therapy to a person once they arrive at the hospital after having a heart attack, to reduce further injury and improve heart function during recovery.
The team says understanding the crosstalk between energy metabolism and epigenetics may not only provide an effective target for heart attacks but also have broad implications in other ischemic injury-caused organ damage beyond cardiac diseases.
The next step would be to test this molecule in large animal models, followed by clinical trials. The research team has been studying the epigenetic regulation of heart attacks for more than 10 years.
If you care about heart attack, please read studies about new way to detect heart attack in people with chest pain, and the upside of a heart attack: It could protect your kidneys—temporarily.
For more information about heart health, please see recent studies about common antibiotic drug linked to higher heart attack risk, and results showing doing this after a heart attack could increase survival.
The study is published in eLife and was conducted by Zhong Wang et al.
Copyright © 2022 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
