A new study from the University of Minnesota Medical School and the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine suggests that increasing heart rate using pacemakers may help people with a certain kind of heart failure feel better, especially those who often feel short of breath.
More than 75 million Americans have high blood pressure, and many of them have thickened heart muscles. Of these, over three million also suffer from a form of heart failure that leads to trouble breathing and tiredness.
In this type of heart failure, the heart muscle becomes stiff and cannot relax well. This makes it hard for the heart to fill up with blood, which leads to congestion and poor blood flow throughout the body.
Dr. Markus Meyer, one of the researchers and a heart doctor at the University of Minnesota, explained that common medicines used to treat another kind of heart failure—where the heart muscle is weak—do not work well for this group.
In fact, one common medicine, called a beta-blocker, might make things worse for people with stiff hearts by slowing their heart rate and increasing the buildup of blood in the heart.
Instead of slowing the heart, the researchers tried the opposite. They used pacemakers to speed up the heart rate in a safe and controlled way. This helped the heart pump blood more effectively and reduced the congestion.
When tested in patients, this approach led to noticeable improvements. Patients said they felt better, breathed more easily, and were able to be more active. They also had fewer episodes of atrial fibrillation, a common irregular heartbeat that can cause more problems in people with heart failure.
Heart failure affects millions of people. About half of these people have what’s called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF. In HFpEF, the heart still pumps well but has trouble relaxing and filling with blood.
The other half have heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, where the heart muscle is weak and cannot pump blood well. There are many treatments for the second type, but few good options for those with HFpEF.
Dr. Margaret Infeld, who led the study, said this research adds important new information. She explained that while doctors have often believed that lower heart rates are better, this study shows that raising the heart rate to a more normal level might actually help people with stiff hearts.
Another researcher, Dr. Daniel Lustgarten, pointed out that the pacemakers used in this study were different from traditional ones. They were placed in a special way, which may be the reason they worked well. Regular pacemakers, if used in the usual way, might not help and could even cause harm in some patients.
The study’s findings are very promising, but the researchers agree that more studies are needed to confirm the safety and benefits of this new approach. They plan to do larger studies involving many hospitals to better understand how to use this treatment and what the best heart rates are for each person.
If you care about heart health, please read studies about how eating eggs can help reduce heart disease risk, and Vitamin K2 could help reduce heart disease risk.
For more information about heart health, please see recent studies about how to remove plaques that cause heart attacks, and results showing a new way to prevent heart attacks, strokes.
The study is published in JAMA Cardiology.
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