A study has found that the hunger hormone ghrelin boosts the heart’s pump capacity in people having heart failure which is mostly common among senior citizens associated with a sedentary lifestyle and high mortality.
The study involved 30 patients with heart failure who were randomly assigned to two groups receiving either active treatment with ghrelin or placebo given intravenously for two hours.
However, after two hours of treatment, the cardiac output increased by an average of 28 percent in the ghrelin group compared with a small reduction in the placebo group.
The reason for the increase in cardiac output was that more blood was pumped from the heart per beat, as the heart rate remain unchanged or was even slightly slower.
The blood pumping capacity was 10 percent higher in the ghrelin group as compared to the placebo group after a follow-up of two-to-five days.
The researchers observed no serious adverse reactions among the patients enrolled for the study.
Moreover, the researchers conducted a study on the mouse heart cells to study the mechanisms responsible for increasing the blood pumping function in the heart.
It was found that the treatment with ghrelin increased the contractile function of the heart cells, and they identified a novel molecular mechanism for this increase.
Today, millions of people worldwide live with heart failure. During this period, the heart muscle weakens leaving the heart unable to pump the amount of blood needed to provide the body with sufficient oxygen and nutrients. The treatments available for it slow the progression of the disease but there are no specific methods that increases the pumping of the blood to the heart.