The pharmaceutical companies have made sure just about everyone on the planet knows what Viagra is. The little blue pill that hit the market in 1998 has helped millions of men battle erectile dysfunction, which is the inability to get or keep an erection. Now, that popular pill may have other talents, which includes helping doctors detect heart troubles.
Viagra’s abilities in mice
Scientists at Johns Hopkins are using mice to test their theory, but they believe Viagra may provide a protein that protects the heart from failure in patients that have high blood pressure.
“This greatly expands our understanding of how high blood pressure affects the heart and helps break down the disease equation into its molecular components for subsequent clinical testing,” study lead investigator Eiki Takimoto, M.D., Ph.D.
Takimoto says the protein in Viagra acts as a protective shield for the heart. In their experiment, mice that had high blood pressure and were taking Viagra did see heart enlargement but not nearly as bad as the group of mice that weren’t taking Viagra. About 90 percent of the mice that weren’t taking Viagra suffered complications from their hearts expanding, and half of them died. Not one mouse died in the Viagra group, and just 30 percent had heart expansion.
The future
“Viagra clearly offers a prolonged protective effect on mouse hearts,” says study senior investigator and cardiologist David Kass, M.D.
Heart experts will continue to investigate this new discovery. It comes on the heels of several studies that show Viagra’s effectiveness in treating other heart related problems.
Funding for the reported study was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the Peter Belfer Laboratory Foundation, and the American Heart Association. The team’s findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
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