Tag: QALY

New breakthrough in heart attack treatment

Are we edging closer towards lowering the risk of recurring heart attacks? Scientists definitely think so. In what has been described as the biggest advance since the discovery of statins, a study has shown that anti-inflammatory injections could lower the incidence of recurring heart attacks in heart attack survivors. Furthermore, these injections have been suggested to also slow the progression of cancer.

It has been discovered that heart attack survivors who were administered injections of a targeted anti-inflammatory drug called canakinumab had a lower risk of such attacks in the future. With this particular drug as well, the incidence of cancer deaths were also reduced to less that fifty percent.

Canakinumab is not normally prescribed for this purpose; its function normally lies in the use for rare inflammatory condition. Instead, the current drugs for the prevention of heart attacks are statins. The main method in which statins prevent heart attacks from recurring is by lowering cholesterol levels. Despite this, statin users who regularly take the drug have a one in four chance of suffering another heart attack within half a decade. While the cause for this is unknown, and research has been done on heart attacks and statins, the current line of thinking is that inflammation within the heart’s arteries are the cause of this recurrence.

The research team followed over 10,000 patients and were led from Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston. One of the hypotheses tested was whether targeting the inflammation with a potent anti-inflammatory agent would provide an extra benefit over statin treatment. In other words, the trial aimed to see if statins combined with canakinumab would be better than just statins alone. The 10,000 patients who had had a heart attack and had all received a positive blood test for inflammation into the trial. In addition to the doses of statins, patients also received either canakinumab or a placebo, both administered by injection every three months. The trial, also known as the Cantos study, lasted for four years.

For the first group – patients who had received the canakinumab injections – the results demonstrated that there had been a 15% reduction in the risk of a cardiovascular event; this means that the risks of heart attacks, either fatal or non-fatal, and strokes had been reduced. But the benefits of canakinumab did not merely end there. The need for expensive interventional procedures, such as surgery such as bypass surgery, or the insertion of stents, was reduced by over three-tenths. The drug did not, however, change cholesterol levels, meaning that it must still be used alongside statins, and the use of statins as cholesterol limiters will still continue to remain so. There was also no significant statistical difference in the number of death rates between patients who had received canakinumab and those who had been given placebo injections.

Dr Paul Ridker, who led the research team, said the study did “usher in a new era of therapeutics”.
This study is the first incidence where scientists have been able to show conclusively that the risk of cardiovascular risk is reduced when inflammation independent of cholesterol is lowered. Why the results have been considered ground-breaking is due to the insight that they have provided; there could be an entirely new way to treat patients and significantly improve health outcomes through the targeting of inflammation, jointly with the lowering of cholesterol. The statistical benefits for patients who took canakinumab were described as being “above and beyond” those seen in patients who only took statins.

Dr Ridker also mentioned that the study showed that the use of anti-inflammatories was the next big breakthrough following the linkage of lifestyle issues and then statins.

“In my lifetime, I’ve gotten to see three broad eras of preventative cardiology,” he said. “In the first, we recognised the importance of diet, exercise and smoking cessation. In the second, we saw the tremendous value of lipid-lowering drugs such as statins. Now, we’re cracking the door open on the third era. This is very exciting.”

But despite the promising results of the treatment, it was not without its negatives. The researchers reported that there was a rise in the potential chance of dying from a severe infection for about a tenth of a percentage point, although this increase was counterbalanced by decrease by over 50% of cancer deaths across all cancer types. The most promising cancer reduction rates were seen in the case of lung cancer. The odds of dying from lung cancer, with the use of canakinumab, were reduced by over three quarters. There was no scope within this study to investigate that further, although subsequent trials to investigate canakinumab’s effect against cancer are being considered.

Prof Martin Bennett, a cardiologist from Cambridge, had no involvement in the study, and while he said the trial results were a promising insight in understanding the occurrence of heart attacks, he expressed concerns both about the side effects, whether the high cost of the drug would pass the Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) test that the NHS administers to determining cost effectiveness of drugs, and also the fact that there were no significantly lesser incidences of deaths between those prescribed canakinumab and those who had received the placebo.

“Treatment of UK patients is unlikely to change very much as a result of this trial, but the results do support investigation of other drugs that inhibit inflammation for cardiovascular disease, and the use of this drug in cancer,” he said. In other words, despite the results of the study and what we can glean from them, he believes statins will still remain the mainstay of recurrent heart attack prevention.

Prof Jeremy Pearson, who is the associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, showed more positive belief about the trial and the possibilities of it opening the doors to new types of treatment for heart attacks.

He mentioned that heart attacks account for a high number of hospitalisations every year. The figure is thought to be close to two hundred thousand people each year in the United Kingdom. He further explained that the use of cholesterol-lowering drugs like statins, when prescribed to these people to reduce their risk of another heart attack, does save lives, but the reduction of high cholesterol rates as a mere medical focus alone is not always a measure that effectively deals with the whole of the problem.

He added that one could be forgiven in feeling a flutter of excitement when it came to these trial results, which have been eagerly awaited by the medical community. The confirmation of previous medical hunches that the continual inflammation is a significant contributor to the risk of heart disease, and that the intent to reduce it could help save lives, is a significant way forward towards the treatment of heart attack patients.

 

This research into canakinumab is one of many that have been conducted into heart attack prevention. We should be cautious about its possible side effects; aspirin, for example, has been shown to cause bleeding when prescribed to heart attack patients. It has also been suggested that  beta blockers for heart attack patients, on the other hand, do not have the ascribed health benefit. Furthermore, if the drug does end up prescribed to heart attack sufferers, what are the side effects when taken for the long term?

Could we possibly see canakinumab being prescribed as a matter of course for heart attack patients to prevent a recurrent? The answer perhaps lies not with whether or not the drug has benefit – it has already proven this in some areas – but whether the side effects can be mitigated. More importantly, the issue of cost will probably determine its future. If the cost of canakinumab could be lowered, so that its prescription to the over two hundred thousand heart attack sufferers per year would not be a significant burden on the financial limitations on the health service, then we could see it being prescribed as a matter of course. If not, then we may have to wait for a less expensive substitute to hit the market. And while it is somewhat disheartening that medical intervention in recent times is more geared not towards finding medicine that works, but medicine that is cost effective, the promise of canakinumab nevertheless is a positive health step.

Red wine – the media’s Wonderdrink

If there is anything to be said about the British media, it is that it seems intent to make a superhero or villain out of the common everyday foods we encounter. Every now and again we are presented with small-scale research on food or drink that promises either a miracle cure or a dangerous red flag. One assumption peddled to us is by continuing to consume the food, we will either gain added health benefit without too much effort. Miracle cure just by eating! The counter to this is the article written to warn against continued consumption. Danger food – consume carefully! You are either a superhero, or a villain in the world of miracle foods.

It is safe to assume that the purpose of these articles is ultimately to hook the reader into buying the newspaper to examine the article further. And if it appears on an online version instead, you can be sure that the intention is to keep the reader glued to the page while paid-for advertising revenue flashes on the side panels. To state it cynically, the purpose of these articles is for sales. It might be long before certain foods such as milk might purportedly be the cure to cancer.

We need not spend too much time judging how effective these media reports are. If you are looking to a newspaper as a reference for health advice, you might as well ask about ballet lessons from the petrol station.

One of the poster children for miracle foods is red wine. Depending on what you’ve read, red wine can:

  • Boost immunity
  • Prevent tooth decay
  • Save your eyesight
  • Be good for the heart

But it won’t help you in the fight against diabetes, or help you lose weight. Was worth considering, though.

One of the latest research into red wine studied if, yes, it could find the ageing process. A US study suggested resveratrol, a substance found in the skin of red grapes, may help keep our muscles and nerves healthy as we get older.

Researchers gave mice food containing resveratrol for a year, then compared the muscle and nerve cells of those mice to cells from mice the same age who’d had a normal diet. In the mice who’d had the resveratrol-enriched diet, they found less evidence of age-related changes.

The researchers also looked at another chemical, metformin, but found it had less effect.

Researchers divided laboratory-bred mice into four groups and fed them either:

  • a normal diet
  • a lower calorie diet from four months of age
  • a diet enriched with resveratrol from one year of age
  • a diet enriched with metformin from one year of age

When the mice were aged two years, they looked at their muscle and nerves, at the meeting point of the two (the neuromuscular junction, or NMJ) in a leg muscle. They also looked at the NMJs of three-month-old mice to see how they compared to the older mice.

Compared with mice fed a regular diet, those who’d been given resveratrol or who’d had a calorie-restricted diet showed:

less fragmentation of tissue at the neuromuscular junction
fewer areas where the nerve cells had degenerated, which would have meant that the muscle no longer had input from nerves

The two-year-old mice which had calorie-restricted diets had neuromuscular junctions that were most similar to the three-month-old mice. Metformin had little effect in this experiment.

The researchers say that this indicates less ageing as muscle fibres increase in size with ageing. But this does not suggest if the ageing was beneficial or not to the subject.

Resveratrol has been of interest to anti-ageing scientists for many years and researchers have previously shown it may be linked to a slowing of the decline in thinking and movement, at least in rodents. This study suggests a possible way this might happen.

But the results don’t tell us anything about what happens in humans. They suggest this substance may be useful for further research in humans at some point. They certainly don’t provide a reason to drink gallons of red wine, in the hope of seeing an anti-ageing effect. Drinking too much alcohol is a sure-fire way to speed up deterioration of thinking skills, and can cause brain damage. Too much alcohol in the long term is linked to several cancers, heart disease, stroke and liver disease.

Although red wine contains resveratrol, the amount varies widely, from around 0.2mg to 12.6mg per litre. That’s nothing like enough to get the amounts consumed in this study.

The mice were fed 400mg of resveratrol per kilogram of body weight each day. To achieve the same level of anti-ageing purported in the study, the average weight woman in the UK (around 70kg) would need 28g of resveratrol a day for the same effect. This would be obtained by consuming more than 2,000 litres of the most resveratrol-rich wine. An average weight man would need even more. This would be going beyond side effects and into the realm of health dangers! Or if you were disturbed by the daily consumption of this amount of alcohol, and still wanted to try, you could eat bin loads of berries – you might need fifty of these a day. What’s for breakfast? Blueberries. Snack? Blueberries powerbar. Lunch? Blueberry soup? Dessert? Blueberry cake. Resveratrol occurs naturally in the skins of some red fruits, including some grapes, blueberries and mulberries. But this rate, anti-ageing might be more of a curse.

The study was carried out by researchers from Virginia Tech, Roanoke College and the National Institute on Aging, all in the US, and was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Is there any thing of value we can glean from this research? One certainly hopes that the whole research was conducted for more significance than mere paper filler.

The effects of rosveratol will probably hold the most interest for researchers. One can imagine that scientists will be looking to produce genetically-modified grapes that hold more of the chemical, or refine the chemical until it reaches higher levels of purity. Drugs, medication, and anti-ageing creams may contain higher levels of rosveratol. Why is there the interest in slowing down ageing? It extends beyond the obvious physical aging. Slowing down the process may also inhibit age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s and dementia.

And while it was of little effect in this particular trial, metformin is currently undergoing trials as an anti-ageing drug. While it is one of the drugs used in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, and marketed under brand names such as Glucophage, it is relatively new as an anti-ageing drug.

Belgian researchers researching metformin found it increased the number of oxygen molecules released into a cell. When tested on roundworms, the worms aged slower, did not slow down, nor develop wrinkles. They grew stronger bones and increased their own lifespan by nearly 40%.

Metformin only costs only 10p a day which means it falls well under the threshold of QALY (quality-assisted life years) cost that the NHS uses to measure cost-effectiveness. It is conceivable that either metformin or rosveratol could form the active ingredient of anti-ageing pills or creams in the future.

And when that happens, you can read all about it in the papers again, about how red wine really lengthens your lifespan! You might even want to sign up for a clinical trial!

The British media is really drunk on red wine.

And did you know, that if it wasn’t for red wine, the world of Classical music might not have reached the dizzy heights that it did? While the link is slightly tenuous, it can be said that if it weren’t for red wine, Classical music might not have attained its popularity. Read about it here and decide for yourself.