Heart Failure and Diabetes Drug

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Anchor lead: Can a drug used in diabetes help people with
heart failure? Elizabeth Tracey reports

October 14, 2019 Dapagliflozin is a drug used to manage diabetes, and now it’s been shown to benefit people with heart failure. Rita Kalyani, a diabetes expert at Johns Hopkins, explains.

Kalyani: What the investigators wanted to do in the DAPA-HF
study is examine whether dapagliflozin reduced progression of heart failure in
those who already had it. This was a hallmark study because it was probably the
first study looking at a population of with and without type 2 diabetes but
using a diabetes medication. What they found was that there’s a tremendous
benefit in lowering the progression of heart failure in those who already had
it, and that this benefit was the same in those with and without diabetes.  :32

Kalyani says this is good news for the more than 26 million people
worldwide who currently have heart failure, a number that is growing so rapidly
global health authorities call it a pandemic. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth
Tracey.