NEW YORK, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- A new class of experimental drugs for heart failure may also help treat a fatal muscular disorder, U.S. researchers discovered.
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center in New York said the medication might be effective even though heart failure and the muscle-wasting Duchenne disease couldn't appear more dissimilar.
Duchenne affects boys, usually before age 6, destroying muscle cells and making them progressively weaker. Many victims die in their 20s.
People with heart failure are robbed of the heart's pumping ability in the seventh, eighth or ninth decade of life, researchers said.
The study found that the muscle cells affected in both diseases have sprung the same microscopic leak that ultimately weakens skeletal muscle in Duchenne and cardiac muscle in heart failure. The leak lets calcium slowly seep into the skeletal muscle cells, which are damaged from the excess calcium in Duchenne.
In people with chronic heart failure, a similar calcium leak continuously weakens the force produced by the heart and also turns on a protein-digesting enzyme that damages its muscle fibers.
Study leader Dr. Andrew Marks hypothesized that a new class of experimental drugs he had designed to plug the leak in the heart could also work for Duchenne. The drugs, when given to mice with Duchenne, dramatically improved muscle strength and reduced the number of damaged muscle cells.
The findings are published in the journal Nature Medicine.
