American Heart Association, Inc.

MONDAY, Nov. 11, 2024 -- The weight-loss drug Ozempic can help reduce stroke patients’ risk of a heart attack or death, a new study says. GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic or SGLT2 diabetes medications like Jardiance or Farxiga both helped protect the health of people following a stroke, researchers found. Patients taking either a GLP-1 or SGLT2 drug had a 74% lower risk of death and an 84% lower risk of a heart attack within an average three years after their stroke, results show. SGLT2 drugs also were associated with a 67% lower risk of a second stroke, researchers report. “Unfortunately, a quarter of people who survive a stroke will have another stroke, and they are also at risk for other cardiovascular events such as a heart attack since many of the risk factors of a stroke are also associated with other forms of heart disease,” said lead researcher Dr. Ali Sheffeh , an internal medicine physician and research scholar at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “Managing these risks, as well as looking at novel approaches to help lower the chances of another stroke, heart attack or death among this population are all critical steps in increasing stroke survival and improving the quality of life for people who have had a stroke,” Sheffeh added in a news release. For the study, researchers reviewed medical records for more than 7,000 adults treated for strokes caused by blood clots between January 2000 and June 2022 in Minnesota or Wisconsin. The team looked specifically at the potential benefits that might come from taking either a GLP-1 or SGLT2 drug after a stroke. GLP-1 drugs help manage diabetes and promote weight loss by mimicking the GLP-1 hormone, which works to control insulin and blood sugar levels, decrease appetite and slow digestion. SGLT2 drugs lower blood sugar levels by causing the kidneys to filter excess sugar from the body and excrete it in urine, researchers said in background notes. The death rate among stroke survivors who took either a GLP-1 or SGLT2 drug was under 12%, compared with 54% among patients who didn’t take either drug, researchers found. The rate of heart attacks among patients taking either medication was 1.5%, compared to 6% among patients taking neither, results show. “The results of the study are consistent with other research about the preventive role of these medications against cardiovascular disease in people with obesity or heart failure,” Sheffeh said. American Heart Association stroke expert Dr. Cheryl Bushnell said the findings jibe with what is known about the benefits of the two types of medication. “For several years now, we have seen from randomized controlled trials that SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP-1 receptor agonists have the ability to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, which includes stroke, heart attack and death,” Bushnell, vice chair of neurology research at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in a news release. “These new findings are in line with what we would expect, and we have seen that these outcomes are evident in patients with Type 2 diabetes and obesity and in patients with obesity without Type 2 diabetes,” Bushnell added. GLP-1 drugs not only promote weight loss, they’ve also been shown to help lower blood pressure and decrease the formation of plaques that clog arteries, Bushnell said. Both are risk factors for heart attack and stroke. “Another mechanism that could be very important for this current study is that GLP-1 receptor agonists can actually decrease clumping of blood platelets, and that, in itself, could decrease the risk of clotting and lead to a lower risk of stroke,” Bushnell said. “We need a clinical trial to know whether these SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP-1 receptor agonists could actually change practice, how we can help patients to prevent a second or recurrent stroke,” Bushnell added. “These medications could be really important, however, we just don't have that data yet.” Researchers presented the findings Monday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. Because theses findings were presented at a medical meeting, they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal. Whatever your topic of interest, subscribe to our newsletters to get the best of Drugs.com in your inbox.

MDisrupt, a marketplace for healthcare technology, has received a $1 million milestone-based investment from American Heart Association Ventures, the newly established venture firm that leads AHA's investments. Texas-based MDisrupt also entered into a service agreement with the American Heart Association to co-develop a platform to connect experts and innovators. MDisrupt offers an AI-powered marketplace for healthcare technology, medtech and life sciences companies to connect experts with 10 years of experience and above with healthcare innovators to advise on building clinically valid companies that will positively affect the healthcare space. "We launched an AI-powered network matchmaking platform where clients can find the experts," Ruby Gadelrab, CEO and founder of MDisrupt, told MobiHealthNews. "We have AI-powered matching and transact with them so they can schedule their meetings. We take care of all of the contracting, we take care of liability insurance, we take care of all of the things that a clinician who wants to work in the industry does not want to take care of for themselves." The AHA has tens of thousands of members, including clinicians, scientists, researchers and business experts, many of whom will be available through the newly co-developed offering to contribute their expertise to innovators. "We often get asked, 'Can you hook me up with experts on this or that?'" Lisa Suennen, managing partner of American Heart Association Ventures, told MobiHealthNews. "People are looking for the expertise that our members have because they genuinely want to employ the best evidence, the best science, the best knowledge to their development of products and services for the market." Suennen said the AHA appreciated that MDisrupt cares about matching science and knowledge and that it was a startup. "We liked that they were a young company, so they were amenable to collaborating on the product, on the growth, the trajectory, all the rest. If you work with a really big, late-stage company, they just want you as a customer; they don't want to hear from you. We wanted to be partners in this endeavor," Suennen said. The AHA provided a $1 million milestone-based investment to MDisrupt, the majority of which MDisrupt has already received. "We gave them three-quarters of the money upfront, and one quarter is dependent on launching the beta of the new product," Suennen said. "So, the successful beta launch of the next-generation product will give them the rest." The platform the partners are co-developing will enable the AHA to make referrals to experts and disseminate evidence-based science to the broader world of innovation. The companies anticipate that the extended MDisrupt offerings that include AHA experts will be released in the second half of 2025. "We're going to be a big partner, and hopefully, this will help them grow significantly and get some additional credibility that will bring others to the table. We hope they're just wildly successful because if they are, we are," Suennen said. From MDisrupt's perspective, the offering will enable clinicians, scientists and people who understand healthcare to be at the industry table so the industry can make more responsible health products faster, Gadelrab said. "The ultimate mission is to actually find the most impactful healthcare products and bring them to market faster because they have the right regulatory people at the table, because they have the right clinicians and because they're solving the correct problem for health systems and for payers," relayed Gadelrab. "The impact, I believe, will be that we will see generation three of health tech and medtech products being much more evidence-based, much more clinically relevant, more integrated into clinical workflows and with a lot more evidence to support them, both for clinical outcomes and for their ROI story and budget impact analysis."

Adults at risk for heart disease who participated in produce prescription programs for an average of six months increased their consumption of fruits and vegetables and had reduced blood pressure, body mass index and blood sugar levels. People at increased risk for cardiovascular disease who participated in produce prescription programs increased their consumption of fruits and vegetables, which was associated with improved body mass index (BMI), blood sugar and blood pressure levels, as well as a decrease in food insecurity. This new research was published today in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, a peer-reviewed American Heart Association journal. Produce prescription programs enable doctors to prescribe fruits and vegetables in addition to medications. Patients receive electronic cards or vouchers to access free or discounted produce of their choice at retail grocery or farmers' markets, explained study lead author Kurt Hager, Ph.D., M.S., an instructor at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. Although previous research has examined the effects of small, individual produce prescription programs, this analysis is believed to be the largest produce prescription study by pooling data from nine programs across the U.S. to assess health outcomes after about six months. "We know that food insecurity impacts health through several important pathways, including overall dietary quality, but also through stress and anxiety, mental health and tradeoffs between paying for food and other basic needs such as housing costs, utilities and medications," said Hager, who completed these analyses while a doctoral student at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston. "These results indicate produce prescriptions may lay an important foundation for improved health and well-being." Study participants received a median of $63 per month to purchase produce at local stores and farmers markets. In addition, participants attended nutrition classes. At the beginning and after completing the program -- which ranged from 4 to 10 months -- participants completed questionnaires about fruit and vegetable consumption, food insecurity and health status. Routine testing of blood pressure; weight and height; and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) -a measure of blood sugar -- was completed at enrollment and at the conclusion of the program. The study did not include a control group and compared outcomes among participants before and after program participation. The analysis of all participants found: "Poor nutrition and nutrition insecurity are major drivers of chronic disease globally, including cardiometabolic conditions like Type 2 diabetes and their cardiovascular consequences, including heart failure, heart attack and stroke," according to Mitchell Elkind, M.D., M.S., FAHA, chief clinical science officer of the American Heart Association and a tenured professor of neurology and epidemiology at Columbia University. "This analysis of produce prescription programs illustrates the potential of subsidized produce prescriptions to increase consumption of nutritious fruits and vegetables, reduce food insecurity and, hopefully, improve subjective and objective health measures. Future research will need to include randomized controlled trials to offset any potential bias and prove more rigorously the benefits of produce prescription programs. The American Heart Association's new Food Is Medicine Initiative will be focused on supporting such trials." The Food is Medicine Initiative, announced in September 2022 by the American Heart Association and The Rockefeller Foundation -- at a White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health -- seeks to ensure patients receive medical prescriptions for healthy food to help prevent and manage chronic disease. Poor nutrition plays a major role in serious long-term illness, including cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes, according to a 2022 American Heart Association Policy Statement: Strengthening U.S. Food Policies and Programs to Promote Equity in Nutrition Security. In 2019 alone, poor nutrition contributed to nearly 8 million deaths, according to the Association's statistics. Food insecurity is the lack of equitable and stable availability, access, affordability to foods and beverages that promote well-being and prevent and treat disease. Study details: The analysis had several limitations, including the lack of a control group for comparison; high rates of missing survey data for food insecurity and fruit and vegetable intake data at the end of some programs; and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on programs that started during that period.