Every year, many people around the world die suddenly from heart attacks. In the UK alone, around 100,000 people lose their lives to heart attacks each year.
A large number of these deaths happen before the person can get to a hospital or receive emergency medical help. One of the main reasons is something called ischemia. This happens when a blood vessel in the heart gets blocked, and the heart muscle doesn’t get enough oxygen.
When this happens, the heart can beat in a fast and irregular way, known as ventricular fibrillation, or VF for short. VF can be deadly and often causes people to die within minutes.
Doctors have tried to find medicines that can stop VF during a heart attack. One medicine, lidocaine, has been shown to work well. It helps control the heart’s electrical signals and can stop VF. But lidocaine has serious side effects.
It doesn’t only act on the damaged part of the heart—it affects the whole heart and the nervous system too. Because of these risks, doctors can only use lidocaine in hospitals, and it must be given through an I.V. This means it cannot help people having a heart attack at home or on the street.
To solve this problem, scientists at King’s College London created a new drug called OCT2013. It looks similar to lidocaine but works in a much smarter way. The researchers tested it in rats that were used to model what happens during a heart attack.
What they found was exciting. OCT2013 stayed inactive in the body until it reached the part of the heart that was low in oxygen. Only in that damaged area did the drug change into active lidocaine. This means it worked exactly where it was needed—nowhere else.
Because it only activated in the affected part of the heart, OCT2013 didn’t cause the usual side effects. It didn’t harm the rest of the heart or the nervous system. In the study, OCT2013 was able to stop the dangerous irregular heartbeats and helped protect the rats from sudden death. It did this while being much safer than regular lidocaine.
This new drug could become the first of a new kind of treatment that only becomes active when needed, making it safer and more useful. If it works the same way in people, it could be used outside of hospitals. That means someone having a heart attack at home might be able to take this medicine and have a better chance of surviving until help arrives.
The research was led by Dr. Mike Curtis and published in the British Journal of Pharmacology. It gives hope that we may soon have a better way to stop sudden death from heart attacks.
This is a big step forward in making heart treatments safer and more effective. With continued work and testing, OCT2013 might one day save many lives around the world.
If you care about heart health, please read studies that yogurt may help lower the death risks in heart disease, and coconut sugar could help reduce artery stiffness.
For more information about health, please see recent studies that Vitamin D deficiency can increase heart disease risk, and results showing vitamin B6 linked to lower death risk in heart disease.
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