Cardiology Letters 2017, 26(1):14-18

Empagliflozin and heart failure

Murín J

I. interná klinika LFUK a UNB, Nemocnica Staré Mesto, Bratislava, Slovenská republika

The latest Guidelines for Heart failure diagnostics and treatment were published in May 2016. They focus mostly on systolic heart failure, and we have no guidelines for diastolic heart failure. Two new drugs have recently become available for the treatment of systolic heart failure. The first is sacubitril/valsartan, supported for entry to the Guidelines owing to positive results in the large clinical study PARADIGM-HF, and this drug has the ambition to replace ACE inhibitors or sartans. The second is an antidiabetic drug, empagliflozin, an SGLT2 inhibitor. It was tested in another large study, EMPA-REG OUTCOME, where it presented great cardiovascular benefit to diabetic patients. Empagliflozin significantly reduced cardiovascular and all-cause mortality and rehospitalizations for heart failure. This article presents the mechanisms of its cardiovascular benefit. It is expected that this drug (and probably also other SGLT2 inhibitors), will be a good new drug for systolic heart failure also, and probably also in non-diabetic patients. These studies are now ongoing: we await their results.

Keywords: heart failure; diabetes mellitus; empagliflozin; SGLT2 inhibitors

Published: January 1, 2017  Show citation