Heart health With all the expensive medical technology that’s available to doctors today, it’s surprising to hear about a simple technique that could be life-saving. It’s called 'conditioning' and involves squeezing your upper arm tightly, using a normal blood pressure measuring cuff. Scientists at the University of Leicester, and University College London (funded by the British Heart Foundation) believe that this technique may be able to reduce the damage to the heart following a heart attack by up to 25 percent.
That would make an enormous difference to the 124,000 people in the UK who have a heart attack each year, and to the cost of treating them. Caring for people with heart disease currently costs £3.2 billion annually.
"It sounds rather crazy, I know, but it does seem to work," said Dr Sadat Edroos, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leicester’s Department of Cardiovascular Science, who is investigating this technique.
"A few years ago, researchers clicked on the idea that if you were to take a muscle such as those in the arm, and temporarily restrict or stop its blood flow, that would prime it to protect itself. They found that doing this to an arm muscle seems to protect the heart muscle too, shielding it from further damage.
"No-one is quite sure why, yet, but it looks as though it is something that’s released into the bloodstream. This could come from the muscle, from the lining of the blood vessels, or perhaps from the nervous system."
Work has been carried out on ‘conditioning’ for some years. British Heart Foundation researchers Professor Derek Yellon and Dr Derek Hausenloy, who are experts in this field, have found several key proteins involved in the conditioning process. Now they want to understand how it protects the heart from damage caused by restoring blood flow and find out what the proteins they have discovered actually do.
"Our researchers have looked at this in small trials by using an inflated blood pressure cuff on the arm as a way to prepare the heart for the stress caused by open heart surgery,” said BHF Associate Medical Director, Professor Jeremy Pearson.
"However, we don’t fully understand the processes involved, which is why we are funding a larger study to find out more about how this technique might work.
"We are looking at this more from the point of view of what happens if you do this with real people, and have been trying this with real people for the last few months." Dr Edroos’s study uses volunteers, who are either healthy or have a condition such as diabetes or high cholesterol. After applying pressure to their arm muscles using a blood pressure cuff, we take a sample of their blood and use it, in our labs, in a model of a simulated heart attack.
"This work, in conjunction with other studies published in the past two years, is creating a compelling argument for the application of this technique to clinical use. I hope that by the end of the decade this simple, cheap, safe and effective tool will be in use across the country," said Dr Edroos.
First published June 10, 2011