CINCINNATI, Ohio – Many people living with diabetes don’t even know their hearts are already under attack. But groundbreaking research hopes to stop and even reverse the damage before it’s too late.
Two in five people will be told they have diabetes during their lifetime.
And people who have it are twice as likely to develop heart disease. One of the deadliest dangers? Diabetic cardiomyopathy.
“It will reduce the ability of the heart to pump the blood efficiently to the rest of the body,” explained Konstantinos Drosatos, PhD, molecular biologist at the University of Cincinnati.
And that impacts a person’s ability to walk, sleep, even breathe.
“You can see the heart as an engine. If we had to go to the gas station to fuel our heart daily, we would need about six to seven gallons of gas per day,” said Prof. Drosatos.
But while the heart burns a lot of fuel, it’s not built for overload. Too much sugar in the heart weakens the way it pumps. That’s why Prof. Drosatos is studying what happens inside heart cells when they’re flooded with glucose.
“How this protein is activated and by glucose that is taken up by heart, and how a transporter of glucose, which actually imports glucose in the heart, plays a role in that,” he told Ivanhoe.
The protein is GLUT1: The gatekeeper for sugar entering heart cells. In diabetes, GLUT1 goes into overdrive, flooding the heart with glucose. That overload then triggers a protein called KLF5, what researchers call a “toxic switch” within the heart. Fat builds up: heart cells get damaged setting the stage for heart failure. But when researchers blocked the GLUT1 in diabetic mice the damage stopped and even reversed.
“The end game here will be to see if by blocking the glucose import we can affect certain molecules that contribute to the disease,” explained Prof. Drosatos.
The goal: To develop new drugs to stop diabetes from damaging the heart before it’s too late.
Because about 90% of people with diabetes have Type 2, new therapies targeting this process could one day help the majority live longer, healthier lives. For now, doctors say the best defense is still a healthy lifestyle, but if this research holds true in humans, it could provide a powerful new defense against heart failure.
Contributors to this news report include: Marsha Lewis, Producer; Matt Goldschmidt, Videographer; Roque Correa, Editor.