Body Building drugs for the heart

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Could a body building drug be a miracle lifesaver for those suffering from heart failure? This is one of the big ticket items in healthcare. Congestive heart failure is the fastest-growing clinical cardiac disease entity in the United States, affecting 2% of the population. Take Bruce Holloway for example. At the age of 53, had become an invalid because his heart was completely giving out. “I couldn’t really breathe actually,” recalls Bruce. His ejection fraction, the percentage of blood pumped out of the heart on a given beat, which is usually 50 percent, had plummeted to 16 percent. “I thought that was the end because I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford a heart transplant,” says Bruce. But Bruce found Dr. Simon Maybaum at Montefiore Medical Center who was studying this: Clenbuterol, an asthma drug from Europe, also used by athletes to help build muscle. But he was testing it in heart failure patients like Bruce.

“From the time I started taking the drug I started feeling a little better and better,” Bruce states. Encouraged by preliminary reports from the U.K., Dr. Maybaum was the first in the U.S. to study the drug clenbuterol in patients with heart failure. Although the primary problem in patients with heart failure is cardiac dysfunction, studies have shown that there is coexisting dysfunction of their skeletal muscle.

So it’s not acting on the heart muscle itself; it’s acting on the chest and abdominal muscles. Dr. Maybaum says, “Clenbuterol has the most potent effect on skeletal muscle making the skeletal muscles stronger and increasing their size and in fact changing fat to muscle in those people who are using it for conditioning in athletic training.”

Preliminary reports suggested that in high doses, this drug might also promote cardiac recovery in patients with implanted LVADS, or left ventricular assist devices--pumps that boost the heart’s function in patients awaiting a heart transplant. Dr. Maybaum states, “If the heart function would improve significantly we would consider explanting the heart pump without going on to heart transplantation and therefore spare the donor heart for someone who might need it.”

In other words, recover so well, the pump is removed…and the transplant averted. For Bruce, his heart function went up to 46%...nearly normal! Bruce says, “It gave me the breathe, my breathe back, I can breathe again. Before I was thinking about dying really, but now I am thinking about living, I have my whole future in front of me.”

Because of this experimental drug, Bruce is going to the gym, and he’s getting married in a few weeks. It’s still an experimental drug here in the U.S. Dr. Maybaum has now completed the first safety trial of this drug in LVAD patients in the U.S. and is working with others to start a much larger multi-center study.

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