Spanish researchers have identified a biomarker of heart damage that indicates which patients with heart failure respond best to conventional therapy and which are at higher risk of worsening.
In a sample of more than 1,000 patients with long-term follow-up, researchers from the Cima University of Navarra and the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital demonstrated that those patients with low blood levels of PICP, a collagen derivative associated with fibrosis heart disease, improve their heart function after treatment, and have a lower risk of future hospitalizations and death. This study represents a breakthrough in understanding the pathological mechanisms that may influence the efficacy of heart failure treatments and offers a new tool that could help prevent and better treat heart disease in the future.
Published in the scientific journal JACC: Heart Failure, the study used the PICP peptide to identify which patients “respond best to conventional therapies in heart failure, and in which they should be reinforced, thus advancing towards the implementation of a personalized medicine strategy in this disease», explains Susana Ravassa, CIMA researcher and first author of the work.
Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the world and many often lead to heart failure, a chronic pathology that limits the ability of the heart to pump enough blood to the rest of the organs. Despite therapeutic advances, many patients with heart failure worsen, being frequently hospitalized and presenting a high mortality.
Heart failure
Josep Lupón, from the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital, also the first author of the study, defends that to improve the personalized treatment of these patients «it is necessary to delve into the alterations that underlie the development of heart failure. It is very common for the heart of these patients to present fibrosis, which can have an impact on their evolution and their response to treatment”.
In previous work, the Cima researchers demonstrated the potential of PICP as a biomarker of fibrosis.
“The results of this work confirm the relevant role of fibrosis in myocardial remodeling that contributes to the development of heart failure. Furthermore, PICP emerges as a promising biomarker to improve phenotyping and risk stratification in patients with this disease. Advancing in the investigation of this biomarker will help to consolidate it as a useful tool to identify patients who will benefit from anti-fibrotic therapy, and to assess the response to treatment”, points out Arantxa González Miqueo, one of the main authors of the work.