Molecular mechanisms and clinical features of heart failure

Abstract

Heart failure (HF) is a common disease with high prevalence, mortality in hospitalization and after discharge, readmission rates, and burden on healthcare system. Activation of the inflammatory systems is an important role for HF progression, and pentraxin 3 (PTX3) is one of the inflammatory markers. The plasma PTX3 levels increased with advancing the HF severity, and high levels of plasma PTX3 indicated poor prognosis in HF patients. Moreover, we demonstrated that PTX3 had the crucial role for cardiac remodeling under pressure overload using two different genotypes of mice: PTX3 systemic knockout mice and transgenic mice with cardiac-specific overexpression of PTX3.

Diuretics are the essential drug for HF treatment, and we designed multicenter, randomized study for evaluating the efficacy and safety of tolvaptan compared to carperitide. Daily urine volume and serum sodium levels were significantly higher, and cardiovascular events were significantly lower in the tolvaptan group than in the carperitide group. Moreover, we investigated the influence of great earthquake in HF patients, and found out that moving into temporary housing by earthquake might affect the incidence of re-hospitalization due to worsening HF.

In this review article, we would introduce our research on HF which has various aspects as described above.