How is obesity related to a common form of heart failure? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, so-called HFpEF, is happening more frequently, especially in those with severe obesity. David Kass, a cardiologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, have looked closely at heart muscle cells from this group of people, those without heart failure, and those who were receiving a heart transplant.

Kass: We took almost 30 parameters, biomechanical life parameters of how these muscle cells worked and we threw it into a machine learning algorithm. We simply asked the algorithm are there groups, do they segregate in any way? It spits out two groups. They're remarkably different clinical features. we look at all the things that everyone has generally considered to be important in HFpEF. One really comes out as being very different and it's the body mass index.              :30

Kass says it’s clear that severe obesity can impact on the heart muscle’s ability to contract, and suggests that’s reversible. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.