New treatment significantly lowers the risk of cardiovascular death in patients with heart failure

A medication, commonly used for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, has been found to significantly lower the risk of cardiovascular death in patients with heart failure. A team of international researchers also found that the same drug was able to reduce worsening heart failure. Two linked studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature Medicine, and delivered at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2022 in Barcelona, looked at the benefits of prescribing the drug dapagliflozin (Farxiga) to patients with heart failure. The Phase III DELIVER trial, which was co-led by Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston/Harvard Medical School and the University of Glasgow, and funded by AstraZeneca, published its results in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers for this study assessed heart failure patients with or without type-2 diabetes and found that prescribing dapagliflozin significantly reduced cardiovascular death or worsening heart failure in patients with heart failure by 18%, when compared to a placebo. The second paper, published in Nature Medicine, looked at data from the DELIVER trial alongside data from the 2019 University of Glasgow-led Phase III DAPA-HF trial, which looked at the impact of prescribing dapagliflozin to patients with another type of heart failure. This study also found that dapagliflozin significantly reduced cardiovascular death in patients with heart failure.