Skip to main content

Is resveratrol the new aspirin for heart attacks?

The newswires are abuzz this month about a recent report suggesting that resveratrol, the polyphenol molecule from red wine, helps restore blood flow and limit muscle damage after heart attack. The typical headline reads something like “Red wine component pill successful during heart attacks” or something similar, with the clear implication that some sort of clinical trial has been done. In fact, it was a study in mice, and while the results were impressive it is only one small step toward the giant leap of clinical practice. What happens in mice doesn’t always happen in humans, so we are no where near the point where your cardiologist is going to give you a resveratrol pill when you show up in the E.R. with chest pain.


Nevertheless, the results are encouraging. What happens in a heart attack is that the plaques that build up in the coronary arteries that feed the heart muscle cause a clot to form, completely obstructing the vessel and depriving the heart of oxygen. It’s similar to what happens to the brain in a stroke. This oxygen starvation is called “ischemia” and when the clot is dissolved and blood flow re-established, it is called “reperfusion.” Paradoxically, this rush of blood flow releases toxins that have built up in the cells, resulting in what is called “ischemia-reperfusion injury.” Transplant surgeons deal with a related issue. The ability of resveratrol to counteract the detrimental effects of ischemia-reperfusion has been well documented in numerous studies, and the recent one in mice confirms those findings. But a mouse heart is tiny, and the question of whether the same effect applies in the large muscle mass of the human heart remains speculative.

A likely scenario is that one of the synthetic derivatives of resveratrol, many of which are much more potent, will emerge as a viable therapy for heart attack and stroke. But clinical studies on resveratrol are few in number, as I have pointed out here recently.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Which came first: Beer or wine? (or something else?)

Actually neither beer nor wine was the first fermented beverage, and wine arguably has a closer connection to health, but recent evidence indicates that humans developed the ability to metabolize alcohol long before we were even human. The uniquely human ability to handle alcohol comes from the digestive enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, or ADH4. A new science called paleogenetics identifies the emergence of the modern version of the ADH4 gene in our ape ancestors some 10 million years ago. Interestingly, this corresponds to the time when our arboreal forebears transitioned to a nomadic lifestyle on the ground. We went from swinging from tree limbs to walking upright, and the rest is history. Understanding the circumstances that led to perpetuation of the ADH4 mutation may contain clues to what made us human in the first place. How the ability to metabolize alcohol made us human Paleogenetecist Matthew Carrigan has an idea about how this happened . Arboreal species rely on fruit tha

Why I am not surprised that the NIH cancelled the alcohol-health study

Not long after enrolling the first patients in the much hyped prospective study on alcohol and health, the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they were pulling the plug. I am actually more surprised that they ever got it off the ground in the first place. As I wrote a year ago when the study was still in its planning stages, there were too many competing interests, criticisms of the study design, and concerns about funding to expect that whatever results came out would be universally accepted. Nevertheless, I am disappointed. The study, called Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health Trial (MACH) was intended to provide hard evidence about the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption by prospectively assigning subjects with heart disease to one drink per day or not drinking, which they were to follow for up to 10 years. Most existing data on the question is retrospective, or simply tracks a subject population according to their drinking preferences, w