Diabetes drug metformin may help treat common heart rhythm disease

Credit: Puwadon Sang-ngern/ Pexels

The human heart is an amazing biological machine controlled by an internal electrical system that produces about 100,000 beats a day.

When abnormal electrical activity causes the heart to beat too quickly, too slowly, or erratically, the condition is called an arrhythmia.

Although most arrhythmias are harmless, some can interfere with the heart’s ability to pump blood.

Atrial fibrillation, the most common type of serious arrhythmia, affects more than 2 million people in the United States.

In a study from Cleveland Clinic, scientists have identified a common diabetes medication, metformin, as a possible treatment for atrial fibrillation.

Atrial fibrillation can lead to complications, including stroke and heart failure.

Treatments have been primarily directed toward trying to prevent the arrhythmia using drugs targeting the electrical system, including ion channels in the heart, or using catheter ablation to isolate the pulmonary veins where initiating beats of atrial fibrillation occur.

However, side effects, limited success and potential complications can limit these approaches.

There is a strong need for new treatments for atrial fibrillation as there have been no new drugs approved in more than a decade.

In the study, the team winnowed down a list of 2,800 FDA-approved treatments by analyzing three data sources: a map of interactions between proteins (called an “interactome”); a network of genes associated with atrial fibrillation; and each medicine’s molecular or genetic targets.

They used advanced computation and genetic sequencing to determine that metformin’s targets overlap strongly with genes dysregulated in atrial fibrillation.

The team found metformin targeted 30 genes associated with atrial fibrillation, with direct effects on gene expression for eight.

Eight other candidate drugs surfaced in the analysis, but the researchers were able to identify metformin as the most promising candidate through testing and reviewing outcomes in large stores of patient data.

Prior work had identified the enzyme AMPK as a potential key regulator for metabolic stress. Metabolic stress has been associated with atrial fibrillation.

This work is related to plans to investigate new atrial fibrillation treatments using genomic data.

Researchers further supported the results of the network analyses with experiments on live beating heart cells grown from human stem cells, showing favorable effects of metformin on gene expression.

If you care about metformin, please read studies about what you need to know about diabetes drug metformin, and people with diabetes should consider taking this vitamin.

If you care about diabetes, please read studies about new drugs to treat diabetes and metabolic syndrome, and heavy cannabis use may decrease the incidence of diabetes.

The study was conducted by Mina Chung et al and published in Cell Reports Medicine.

Copyright © 2022 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.