β-adrenoceptor blockade: a novel treatment for right ventricular dysfunction caused by pulmonary hypertension?
Pulmonary hypertension is a serious condition that affects blood vessels in the lung and can lead to heart failure affecting the right side of the heart. Medicines called beta-blockers reduce the effect of chemicals such as adrenaline on the heart and help people with left-sided heart failure, but until now, they were not thought to be useful for treating right-sided heart failure. Professor Edward White and colleagues have been awarded a three-year grant to find out whether a medicine already being used to control some types of heart failure, could help people with pulmonary hypertension, a debilitating condition that can lead to right-sided heart failure. The team has been studying in detail how electrical signals that control the heart’s beat are affected in animals with pulmonary hypertension. They will now test, in rats, what effect beta-blockers have on the damage caused by the condition, looking at the heart as a whole, and on individual heart cells. This will help them work out whether or not beta-blockers would control heart failure in people with pulmonary hypertension.
Project details
| Grant amount | £209,316 |
|---|---|
| Grant type | Project Grants |
| Application type | Project Grant |
| Start Date | 14 March 2013 |
| Duration | 3 years |
| Reference | PG/13/3/29924 |
| Status | Complete |
