New Zealand breakthrough paves way to life-saving treatments for diabetics

New Zealand scientists have made a breakthrough in solving the mystery of why heart disease is the biggest killer of diabetes sufferers, paving the way for new treatments.

University of Otago researchers said Wednesday they had identified harmful molecular changes in the cells of diabetic hearts that begin before cardiovascular symptoms even appeared.

They found that a normal cell process called autophagy was deregulated in diabetic hearts, so that a marked increase in autophagy triggered activation of pro-cell death proteins, leading to progressive loss of cardiac cells.

As more cells died, cardiac dysfunction developed and heart failure followed.

Lead researcher Dr Rajesh Katare said the team also found that diabetes increased autophagy through activation of the protein Beclin-1, which presented "an extremely promising target for new treatments of diabetes-related cardiac disease."

"We found that these molecular alterations begin in the diabetic heart from an early stage of the disease -- before any clinically identifiable symptoms -- so blocking them could be useful in combating cardiovascular complications in diabetes," Katare said in a statement.

When the researchers lowered the gene expression of Beclin-1 in rat heart cells exposed to high glucose, excessive autophagy and cell death rates were much reduced.

"Given that the growing diabetes epidemic is set to create major global economic and social costs in coming decades, it is very exciting to have opened up a new research avenue that could greatly decrease the disease's burden," Katare said.

Diabetes affected more than 365 million people worldwide with rates expected to double by 2030, and studies showed that at least 60 percent of people with the disease died because of cardiovascular complications. Endi