RESVERATROL AFTER HEART ATTACK

Of the 1.2 million heart attacks that occur annually in the U.S., approximately 460,000 die, many before medical help can reach them.  Among the survivors, damage to the left side of the heart is common.  About 5-10 percent of heart attack survivors will develop a condition called atrial fibrillation, where the top chambers of the heart flutter, which can result in a blood clot that gets shuttled to the brain and can result in a stroke.  Electric shock from the defibrillator can also re-synchronize the top chambers of the heart back to normal, preventing this event.

There is a frantic search for new drugs that might remedy the problem of fibrillation and high mortality following a heart attack.  [Expert Opinion Emergent Drugs 10: 311-22, 2005]  Such a drug must be safe and effective.  At $5 a day, a drug would save Medicare and insurance plans billions of dollars over implantation of internal defibrillators and provide more timely relief to patients.  Researchers promise drugs are under development, but are likely to take time and put patients at risk while they are tested. 

Aware of the urgent need for such a drug, researchers at the Harbin Medical University in China tested such a drug in rodents.  The “drug” is resveratrol, more popularly known as a red wine molecule, but also available as an extract from botanical sources. 

Chinese researchers intentionally reproduced a heart attack (ventricular fibrillation – fluttering in the lower heart chambers) in rodents by cutting off blood supply to a coronary artery for a time.  The animal hearts began to fibrillate, on average for 164 seconds, and 50% of the animals died.  When lidocaine, a pain relieving drug that is commonly administered to humans during a heart attack, was given to the animals just prior to the induced heart attack, the fibrillation lasted only 84 seconds and mortality rates dropped from 50% to 10%.  When the animals were administered research-grade resveratrol, equivalent to a 700- milligram human dose, fibrillation lasted 112 seconds and mortality was also cut to just 10%.  [Biochemical Biophysical Research Communications 340: 1192-99, 2006]

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A resveratrol pill has passed a safety trial for use in a human trial in Europe for cancer prevention.  Resveratrol is considered non-toxic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  So there should be little concern over its safety.